As is not too unusual these days, Nicolas Cage has given us what I consider pretty lightweight fare in this film.

Cage plays Rick Santoro, a nicely bent Atlantic City cop who is never surprised to find a thick envelope in his coat pocket. Part of his beat is an aging casino-sports complex, soon to be reduced by its owners, the Powell consortium (pay-TV, gambling, defense missiles … ) to make way for a brand new 21st century casino-sports complex. Santoro is present at the sports complex’s final event, a heavyweight slugfest between the local black champ and a cocky Latino upstart. Also present is Santoro’s old schoolmate and buddy Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise), a navy commander who is in charge of security for the Secretary of Defense who, for some reason, came to see this fight. But in the middle of the fight, right after champ Tyler is knocked for a loop, an Arab terrorist assassinates the SecDef and is himself killed by Dunne. But Santoro is, for several reasons, not satisfied with this official result — especially because of a couple of disappearing women, one of whom was shot at the same time as the Secretary — and finds himself involved in a maze of deceit and betrayal. Oooh, I like those words!

I am not sure why I was so annoyed with this film. Perhaps because it gave away the identity of the real villain much too early (Dunne, if you want to know). Perhaps because it included some scenes that were simply unbelievable (why did Dunne shoot two of his own people? why did he not shoot a couple of others?). Perhaps because several of the characters seemed to behave totally out of character (why would an Arab terrorist choose to work with a U.S. naval commander? why would Santoro, whose motto seems to be “to get along, go along” choose this particular moment to discover Duty?). Perhaps because the entire film was shot on a single sound stage, or so it appeared (except for a few moments outside in the driving rain, and the epilogue).

My favorite scene, I suppose, was Santoro’s use of the complex’s fifteen hundred TV cameras to track down one of the missing women. That’s probably because the idea of “everybody under TV surveillance all the time” in the movies goes back to a novel written in Esperanto in the thirties (Mr. Tot aĉetas mil okulojn by “Jean Forge” — Polish author and filmmaker Jan Fethke), which was the source of Fritz Lang’s last film (Die Tausen Auge des Doktors Mabuse), which in turn seems to have inspired the recent Sharon Stone film Sliver. Of course, maybe they do have everybody under TV surveillance all the time these days…

My recommendation? Rent it on videotape or DVD — if you feel the urge to see it.