MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Gun’ Has Thriller In Its Sight

John Frankenheimer, the director of “Year of the Gun,” demonstrated a crackerjack gift for the political thriller back in the ‘60s with films such as “The Manchurian Candidate” and “Seven Days in May.”

He rejimmied the genre by bringing to it the free-form, lickety-split techniques he learned from years of working in television, and this gave his films a freaky, hot-footed quality. They looked and moved with a snaky grace, as if the director and his camera were a single, mobile unit: a heat-sensing device targeted for the main event.

Frankenheimer could navigate his way effortlessly through the narrative zigzags of “The Manchurian Candidate” because he had developed a style loose enough to incorporate the script’s baroque nuttiness.

That was a long time ago.

Political thrillers, at their best, combine the long-term techniques of drama with the immediacy and velocity of daily journalism. But there’s a special problem with the form right now: for most audiences, political crises have become so much the province of nightly sound-bitten bulletins on television that, by comparison, any movie is likely to seem draggy.

“Year of the Gun” (selected theaters) would seem pretty draggy anyway. “Z” it’s not.

Set in Rome in 1978 at the height of the Communist Red Brigade-inspired violence to overthrow the existing government, Frankenheimer’s new film, scripted by David Ambrose, seems mildewy and staid. The plot culminates in the kidnaping (and subsequent murder) of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, but the machinations of the Brigade aren’t detailed in a way that makes that violent episode reverberate for us.

It’s not a matter of American audiences not caring to know about the political outrages of other countries; the filmmakers haven’t made them matter to us.

Andrew McCarthy plays David Raybourne, a former campus radical living in a ratty apartment in Rome and working as a journalist for an American paper. His upper-class Italian lover (Valeria Golino) is separated from her abusive husband, who hounds her and has David beaten up. Undeterred, David plots his escape: he cooks up a thinly fictionalized novel about the Red Brigadiers that he hopes will net him enough loot to scram in style with his lady love and her child and start afresh.

The film’s one original aspect is that David’s book turns out to predict the course of violence with such prescience that, once its existence is found out, everybody believes him to be a species of spy. Since no one in this film (rated R for violence, sensuality and language) is quite what they seem anyway, David’s predicament has a convincing paranoia; it’s the kind of scary coincidence that’s commonplace in war zones.

Frankenheimer tries to keep things moving: There’s some kind of drive-by assassination or riot or chase scene in practically every reel. The lovers also go in for a healthy amount of nude tussling: the bedsheets and sofa cushions get a workout. He introduces characters, such as the Rome college professor played by John Pankow, or Sharon Stone’s daredevil photojournalist, who seem to be set up for something bigger and better.

But the actors are pinioned by the fatuous dialogue, with its mealy-mouthed platitudes and trying-to-be-bright zingers. It used to be said that people only talked like this in the movies, but it’s been a long spell since any movie was this tin-eared. And you can’t take the politics in this film terribly seriously when all the Red Brigade operatives are portrayed as tight-sphinctered meanies out of a WWII Nazi melodrama.

What’s missing from “Year of the Gun” is the sheer density of political intrigue. The movie presents a broad canvas, all right, but the detailing is strictly by-the-numbers.

‘Year of the Gun’

Andrew McCarthy: David Raybourne

Valeria Golino: Lia Spinelli

John Pankow: Italo Bianchi

Sharon Stone: Alison King

An Edward R. Pressman production released by Triumph Releasing Corp. Director John Frankenheimer. Producer Edward R. Pressman. Executive producer Eric Fellner. Screenplay by David Ambrose, based on the novel by Michael Mewshaw. Cinematographer Blasco Giuarto. Editor Lee Percy. Costumes Ray Summers. Music Bill Conti. Production design Aurelio Crugnola. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.

MPAA-rated R for violence, sensuality and language.