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TV Reviews : ‘Doublecrossed’: Story of Drugs and Politics

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As if to come full circle from “Easy Rider,” Dennis Hopper plays a repentant drug dealer in “Doublecrossed,” an HBO movie based on the fascinating true story of flyer-turned-informant Barry Seal (premiering tonight at 9).

Explaining his change of heart to the feds in the picture, he even gets to deliver a speech about how in the old days the drug scene was about love and personal exploration, but now it’s about escaping reality and murder--a moralizing speech that sounds like it’s coming more from the mouth of Dennis Hopper than Barry Seal.

That’s part of the problem with the underdeveloped characterization of Seal as written and directed by Roger Young: He comes off as a likeably amoral character--a funny, exuberant, thrill-seeking cowboy--whom the filmmakers want desperately to give a solid moral core to cement his heroism as well as the picture’s secondary anti-drug message.

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But “Doublecrossed” is more interesting when it’s about politics than when it’s about drugs. Seal was apparently a mostly apolitical fellow--here, really just a Louisiana good ol’ boy--who, when caught flying drugs from South America, volunteered to continue his trips and, in the process, bring in the leaders of the Medellin cartel of Columbia. Little did he know the cross-fire he was flying into.

Apparently close to luring his prey into America, his cover was blown by none other than Oliver North, who was desperate to show Congress Seal’s surreptitious photos of Sandinista officials involved in drug transactions in order to raise Contra support.

Eventually, forced into serving a very public probation where his many enemies could take a shot at him, Seal predictably was gunned down--dying for Ollie’s sins, as it were.

The backdrop of what turned Seal into an unwitting, unlikely martyr is inherently transfixing. But “Doublecrossed” suffers from Young’s inability to get any focus on Seal’s character; the transformation from anything-for-a-new-sports-car pilot to “let’s-go-burn-us-some-bad-guys” good guy is left unmotivated beyond his obvious desire to avoid doing time.

As always, you can’t take your eyes off Hopper, but he too has been double-crossed by a script that can’t quite tell him which direction to focus all that energy.

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