MOVIE REVIEW : Packaging the Political Thriller

There’s no wasted motion in “The Package” (citywide), a post- glasnost political thriller in which an Army sergeant, wrongly wanted for murder, stumbles onto an international anti-disarmament conspiracy. The movie races from scene to scene, moment to moment, country to country, with the breakneck velocity of a motorcycle crashing through a computer room.

Director Andy Davis (“Code of Silence”) keeps his scenes jumping with pungent details, banter, edge-of-the-frame business sliding past fast. The editors, Don Zimmerman and Billy Weber, never let the film linger. They keep it blasting along, intercutting several planes of action, lucidly knotting up multiple plot strands--right from a brisk Berlin peace conference opener to a wildly improbable finale: Gene Hackman’s Sgt. Gallagher racing under the El, wearing a pop-eyed grimace that’s a homage to “The French Connection.”

Hackman races practically everywhere in this movie, even when a phone call might suffice. The movie stays in overdrive: It can’t give us any breathers or its mix of ultra-realistic surface detail and barmy plot formulas might collapse. “The Package” is like a bad dream culled out of TV newscasts and gussied up with film noir plot shtick. The writer, John Bishop, mixes up the old love-on-the-run plot--Hackman and wife Joanna Cassidy on the lam--with the ultra-paranoid form of “The Parallax View” and a stop-the-assassin premise that recalls “The Day of the Jackal.”

We knew Charles de Gaulle wasn’t going to be assassinated by the Jackal, and we can guess nothing bad is going to happen to the Soviet premier and American President here--especially when we see that they’re being played by actors who are ringers for Gorbachev and Bush. Instead, the suspense boils out of Gallagher’s predicament and the scheme’s complexity--the patsy deliberately reminiscent of Lee Harvey Oswald set up as the fall guy for the real killer: Tommy Lee Jones as a mercenary commando.

Jones plays psychopaths with a burnt-out gaze and a mirthless smile that suggests that the only real sensual kick he gets anymore is from a well-executed murder. This snaky sensuality bounces interestingly off Hackman’s fine work as Gallagher the good soldier and the third military archetype played by John Heard: a tight-lipped, tight-bottomed bureaucrat and Cold War lover.

“The Package” (MPAA-rated R for violence) tries to tackle interesting issues rather than hook into another revenge fantasy--though it doesn’t have the baroque nuttiness of a Richard Condon-derived political thriller like “The Manchurian Candidate.” Hackman, Jones, Heard, Cassidy, Pam Grier and Dennis Franz--in another of his greaseball cop roles--are always interesting to watch. And Davis still suggests he might evolve into an action specialist in the Don Siegel-Phil Karlson class--if he chooses less apocalyptic scenarios.

‘THE PACKAGE’

An Orion Pictures release. Producers Beverly J. Camhe, Tobie Haggerty. Co-producers Dennis Haggerty, Andrew Davis. Director Davis. Script John Bishop. Camera Frank Tidy. Editors Don Zimmerman, Billy Weber. Production design Michael Levesque. Music James Newton Howard. With Gene Hackman, Joanna Cassidy, Tommy Lee Jones, John Heard, Dennis Franz, Pam Grier.

Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes.

MPAA rating: R (younger than 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian).