There's an adage in the world of drama, which goes something like this -- "a pistol hung on the wall in Act One must be fired by Act Three". I think it was Chekov who said that but I could be wrong.<br /><br />There's almost nothing to like about this confused mess of a movie, except for the strong presence of Lauren Holly as the U.S. Senator and Angus MacFayden as her sinister brother. It seems to be totally unlikely that such a clever political operator as 'the Senator,' who is a controlling and driven person, would be unable to rein in her do-wrong brother. He's a bottom feeder, a leg-breaker for some loan shark who has absolutely no scruples.<br /><br />The goofy drug-addled daughter -- Cassie -- gets to make a very fine presentation of a Martin Luther King speech, but only after she's already dead in the plot.<br /><br />This movie is a mess, with conflicts presented that have no discernible origins and actions taken by the principal characters which have no discernible back-grounding. It reeks of spy movie clichés without giving the viewer any kind of orientation ....<br /><br />Yes, the actors do very well with a minimalist script and some nice photography, and the viewer wants to know more about them before the tragic ending turns into 'bathos,' i.e., imitation pathos.<br /><br />It cannot be recommended for any of those reasons. It is as if the producer/director lost some pages of a much bigger and better script and then ran out of film, money and maybe even time to finish the story. It's not a boring film, it's a confusing and unsettling and emotionally unavailable film, even though the entire presentation of the plot is based on the emotions of the leading characters.<br /><br />There's lust, there's love turned to hate, there's dissolute drug-induced behavior and two totally a-moral bad guys, one of whom is the brother character. What an absolute and total waste of a potentially great theme, great cinematography, and intensely personal acting.<br /><br />The DVD is well done. Too bad that the excellent transfer was used to put this absolutely worthless film on digital media. I cannot even recommend it for being so entirely bad, as it isn't, for the reasons I've noted. This film starts well and then descends into a swamp of nihilism and sour, unrepentant, dramatic manipulation.<br /><br />Too bad IMDb doesn't provide negative numbers for ratings, because this howling dog deserves a minus 10 .....