No Way Out

April 13, 2008 - Kevin Costner runs around Washington, DC and the Pentagon in this fast-paced thriller from 1987. Gene Hackman, Sean Young and Will Patton co-star. Fred Dalton Thompson has a small role as the CIA director.

Costner plays Lt. Commander Tom Farrell, a young, smart and handsome Navy officer. He's buds with Scott Pritchard (Patton), the counsel for Defense Secretary David Brice (Hackman). At some inaugural ball, Pritchard introduces Farrell to Brice, but Farrell is more interested in Susan (Young), Brice's beautiful mistress. Fast forward a few months and Farrell is now on Brice's staff. He's supposed to get the dirt on a new stealth submarine which Brice feels won't be very stealthy at all.

That mission changes when Brice kills Susan in a fit of rage over her affair with another man. No one knows that Farrell is that other man, so Pritchard convinces Brice to go along with the story that Susan's lover was a Russian mole named Yuri and that he's the one who killed her. Farrell is assigned to find Yuri. For everyone involved, the cover-up is definitely worse than the crime.

Overall review: *** The movie is just shy of two hours long, but snappy dialogue and a couple of chase scenes keep the film from dragging. Those elements also help to overcome a somewhat convoluted plot. The movie also holds up well despite obvious Cold War overtones and what is, by 2008 standards, primitive computer technology. About the only thing I didn't like was the music over the opening titles. It was a little too "suspenseful" for aerials of DC and Arlington.