Customer Reviews

Ambushed [VHS]

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Courtney Vance plays the role of the only black cop on a southern, all white, good ole boy police department. Virginia Madsen plays the only female cop on that same force. They are simpatico with each other, as both are treated in the way one might expect someone of their race and gender to be treated by bigoted sexists and racists, covert though it may be. Although, it is actually not all that covert.

Then, the head of the local Klu Klux Klan gets murdered one night, leaving his son as a living eye witness to his father's murder. All hell breaks loose, as another witness says that the murder was commited by two black men, identified to be the leaders of a militant black group. When the police find the boy, they discover that the apple did not fall far from the tree, as he is a dyed in the wool racist, spouting racial investives at Vance, who remains remarkable calm in the face of being grossly insulted by a twelve year old pipsqueak who idolizes Hitler.

When the black militants turn up dead, something seems to be wrong with the entire picture. In the meantime, the boy is taken by Courtney Vance and three other cops to a supposed safe house, and on the way their car is ambushed by a group of gunmen wearing political masks. With Vance and the boy on the run with these masked freaks in pursuit, the boy grudgingly begins to bond, slowly but surely, with the man who is hellbent on saving his life.

In the meantime, Robert Patrick, of Terminator 2 and X-Files fame, assumes the mantle of leadership for the Klan. It turns out that he had been estranged from the boy's dead father due to a difference in their ideological fanaticism. While the dead man had confined his ideology of hate to local haunts, the new leader is a militant white supremacist with a more global vision of racial hatred. He, too, is looking for the boy. The reasons why are at the crux of the mystery.

While the film is painfully obvious, at times, in that you can see where the film is going vis-a-vis the boy's ideological beliefs, it is still a pretty absorbing film. So what that the viewer knows that the boy is supposed to undergo an ideological shift due to his interaction with Vance. It doesn't diminish the action and suspense in the film. Also, it is obvious that Madsen and Vance will join forces in an attempt to get to the bottom of what is going on. It is still interesting to see the mechanisms employed to get them going in the right direction.

Director Ernest Dickerson deftly directed this HBO TV movie which tackles the race card without being preachy, as well as conspiracy theories and frame ups. It is a tautly written, well acted film, with plenty of action to go around. It definitely an interesting and gripping film.

Ambushed (1998) A terrific supporting cast can't make up for a miscast star in this racially charged action drama. Courtney B. Vance is supposed to be playing a tough but fair cop who gets mixed up in a huge white supremacist conspiracy while trying to protect the son of a murdered KKK leader. But Mr. Vance is far too soft and sensitive for this role, no matter how many guns director Ernest Dickerson has him fire. Other than Vance, everyone else is right at home, including William Forsythe (Direct Hit), Robert Patrick (TV's The Unit), Virginia Madsen (The Haunting in Connecticut), William Sadler (Die Hard 2), David Keith (An Officer and a Gentleman), and the late Charles Hallahan (The Thing '82),to whom the film is dedicated. Also of note are the performances of lesser known but very effective Scott Simpson (New Best Friend), J. Michael Hunter (New Best Friend), and William Flaman as the henchmen of villainous Patrick. This would have been a terrific vehicle for Wesley Snipes; as it is, it's merely passable. Still, you could do worse with that supporting cast.

Given what it is, this HBO TVM has a screenplay a notch above the usual neanderthal level of most in the action genre, and strong direction by Ernest Dickerson. The subject matter of white supremacy is a generally unpalatable one, since the people presented as pro are inevitably cartoons, even within the limitations of the genre. This treatment is defined by the re-politicalising of the son of the KKK's Grand Dragon, who is the only witness to his father's killing, which is falsely blamed on black cop Courtney Vance. The plot then becomes a multiple pursuit of the boy who has fled with Vance after the titular ambush has aligned them, by both the law and the KKK. The condition is therefore set for the boy to realise the error of his abstracted prejudice, by having Vance demonstrating kindness (by trying to save his life) of an individual. However Vance's performance works against this idea, since he doesn't have a likeable persona. This charge may make me vulnerable to the accusation of racism, but when a screenplay introduces him watching home movies of his deceased child, who by an unimaginative coincidence would be the exact age of the Dragon boy if he were still alive, and gives him a romance with the only female cop in their small police force, we begin to sense something is off-balance. It's easier to identify with the quirkiness given to the KKK stooges, particularly when one refuses to follow Vance and the boy down a drainpipe because he's wearing a suite. Vance isn't given any similar accessability, and when the boy throws slurs at him, we're more likely to emphathise with the racist. In spite of some scenes which I found superfluous, and a stinker with the boy's memory of the killing of his elder brother intercut with the father's telling, Dickerson keeps up the tension. The ambush features gunmen wearing a Bill Clinton and Nixon mask, and gunfire is machine gun multiple as opposed to single fire duets. This may be attributed to the level of testosterone of the supremacists, but I'd prefer to think of it as Dickerson's touch. He also provdes some interesting editing jump cuts in the approach to the Bill Clinton gunman, and a chase featuring Virginia Madsen as the female cop. The crisp white shirt of an officer who turns out to be the framing secret supremacist, and his oreo joke are perhaps a little obvious, but I liked the line a waitress has - "I'm not a mind reader. I'm just a waitress" and the way the actress delivers it. The music is another problem - it seems continuous and more suited to a horror movie. The climax of the film is odd, since it alters the expectation, where now Madsen and Vance pursue the bad guys, and not vice versa. This aggressiveness throws our sympathies again to the supposed bad guys, as anyone on the defensive automatically does, and not even a tirade by the leader managed to shift the empathy back for me. Madsen's presence is a major plus. Although assigned to a relatively minor role and her character carrying additional and unflattering weight, she still makes more of an impression than Vance, and even Jeremy Lelliott as the boy has some truthful moments, which only makes Vance look worse in comparison.