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No wonder the army wouldn't cooperate with the filming of The General's Daughter. Nelson DeMille, the novelist on whose book the story was based, has some awfully dull axes to grind with the policy of fully integrating women the military. Making his point none too subtly, he not only puts his title character through a brutally vicious gang-rape by other cadets while on a field exercise at West Point (seen in flashback), but has her murdered under similar circumstances seven years later. Crack army detective Warrant Officer Paul Brenner (John Travolta), who happens to be on the fictitious Southern base (whose exact location isn't specified, but the film was shot in Savannah) investigating a black market gunrunning scheme (which leads early on to a bloody, unlikely action sequence that's looks out of place since it's the only such protracted confrontation in the whole movie, but was apparently deemed necessary to establish Brenner's bad-assness) falls into the case. It's hardly seems like a fortuitous career opportunity, though, since the base commander, General Joseph Campbell (Joseph Campbell? Mr. Modern Mythology? And where are Colonel Hans Christian Andersen and Major Uncle Remus, may I ask?), played by Babe's James Cromwell, is about to retire from the military and take up politics. So Brenner is supposed to quietly solve the crime, without shaking any trees, before procedure dictates the FBI be called in after 36 hours. He starts nosing around, aided by Warrant Officer Sara Sunhill (Madeline Stowe - but speaking of questionable character names, doesn't "Sara Sunhill" sound like the mascot for a raisin company?), the base rape-crisis counselor who also, as fate would have it, was Brenner's fiancé several years earlier when they were stationed in Europe.
From there the plot doesn't just thicken, it coagulates, as they find out Capt. Campbell was having sadistic sex with practically every y-chromosome on the base - kind of Basic Training Instinct. Brenner first suspects her immediate superior Col. Moore (James Woods), who's obviously hiding something (don't ask, don't tell, wink wink), but he's just the first of several red herrings, including the chief MP (Timothy Hutton), the general's obsessive aide-de-camp (Clarence Williams III), the local cracker sheriff's deputy/son, a couple other - pardon the expression - grunts, and even The General himself. Our dauntless investigators hop in helicopters to track down leads all over the South, each passed on by a character who spills nearly everything then pulls up short with a statement like "I know more, but I'm not talkin'. If you want the truth - can you handle the truth? - go ask ______." By the time the murderer is found, you'll be thanking your lucky stars there's no longer a draft.
Travolta is no more than okay as the blue collar, non-commissioned sherlock who disarms more-educated types with such self-deprecation as, "My dad was a drunk, a gambler and a womanizer; I worshipped him," in a movie which almost entirely screams Made For Television. Only a couple choice exchanges with Woods, too few to compensate for the lack of chemistry between Travolta and Stowe, might even remotely make this film watchable for those who can stomach the violence. The graphic scenes of sexual assault are bad enough, but at times The General's Daughter also looks like some pre-Miranda fascist fantasy, since suspects of crimes under military jurisdiction are portrayed as having zero to no rights, allowing Brenner to simply beat the truth out of a couple problematic leads. Still, for all its histrionics, the plot could have been fairly engaging had its realization not been so weak. The film, which was directed by Con Air's Simon West, even suffers from glaringly bad editing; things happen such as a blown-out tire magically healing itself by the next shot, and confusing cuts where somebody confusingly walks halfway into frame then disappears. But worst of all, it makes the cardinal error for a mystery by asking us to respect the intelligence of characters who often overlook things that are glaringly obvious to the audience - especially James Wood's offscreen statement that this is "one of those pictures that makes a billion dollars and wins an Oscar."
Uh, Mr. Woods? "Dis-missed." C-
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