This film has a neat enough premise; the US president gets caught with his hand in the underage cookie jar right before election time, and his hatchetman Conrad Brean (De Niro) goes out to divert public attention. To do so, he enlists the aid of Hollywood producer Stanley Motss (Hoffman) and the two cook up an entirely fictitious war for the president to deal with and solve in statesmanlike fashion. It certainly captured the public's imagination at the time (Clinton & Lewinsky), went through a revival in the Balkans during the Kosovo crisis (in the film, the phony war is with Albania, which borders on Kosovo), and at the time of writing, with the US economy in trouble and war with Iraq looming, is being dredged up again. But "Wag the Dog", I am sad to say, has a fatal flaw in common with most conspiracy theories: its credibility ceases about five minutes after the opening credits. We are made to believe that every single person enlisted in Brean and Motss's project can be trusted to "never say a word about this to anyone." Surely, only dead men tell no tales, but a trail of dead actors, gaffers and special effects people would be noticed (okay, maybe not the actors). It's never made clear to us whether the war is completely fictional, or its causes are fictional but the war is all too real. In the former case, any journalist arriving in Albania would presumably notice a marked lack of US troops; in the latter, one would expect more (in fact, any) footage of Brean threatening the careers of various generals. Motss cooks up a fictional SpecOps unit for dramatic purposes, with the explanation that nobody's heard of it because it's so secret; this unit then parades down the Washington Mall, its members' faces visible to all and sundry, in highly distinctive garb (the half-black/half-leopard print beret... please!), contrary to practice of every existing SpecOps unit. Most of the cast of "Wag the Dog" deliver a fine performance; the direction and production values are more than adequate. All of it is ultimately wasted on a script which is riddled with holes through which you could drive an 18-wheeler.
Review of Wag the Dog
