A political satire irretrievably misdirected from its basic premise: a thirty-something Right-wing folk singer, one of whose albums has climbed as high as #3 on the Billboard pop chart, who is running for one of the Pennsylvania senatorial seats on the monosyllabic slogan of "Pride." (The year is 1990.) If this premise does not self-destruct spontaneously, the samples of the man's music will lend a throat-cutting hand: little ditties entitled "Drugs Stink" and "Bleeding Heart" whose lyrics and arrangements might meet the standards of a specialty number at a celebrity roast or on the Jerry Lewis telethon, but scarcely those of a Top Ten album. The fundamental problem seems to be that writer-director-star Tim Robbins is so deeply entrenched a liberal that he hasn't the foggiest notion of what goes on on the far side of the battlefield. The only thing he can think to do is to graft incongruous conservative attitudes on top of liberal models: album titles, cover art, even a music video ("Wall Street Rap") are all knockoffs of Bob Dylan; the awestruck male groupies and, after an assassination attempt, candlelight-vigil keepers are just John Lennonites; the assassination attempt itself, although faked for political advantage (ha-ha), conjures up Bobby Kennedy. The movie would appear to have been influenced strongly by This Is Spinal Tap, borrowing its pseudodocumentary format (built-in excuse for the meandering, undirected camerawork) as well as borrowing a couple of actual scenes therefrom, but it hasn't the same good sense, the same self-preservative instinct, to present its protagonist as a loser. Alan Rickman, Ray Wise, Gore Vidal. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd