The prospect of watching Clint Eastwood being annoyed, exasperated, disgusted by John Malkovich for an entire movie, and then foreseeably dusting him off at the end of it, certainly sounds like a reasonable evening's entertainment. You won't be much let down. Eastwood plays a Secret Service agent -- an acknowledged "dinosaur" and "borderline burnout," just in case you were wondering about mandatory retirement -- and Malkovich is an ex-CIA guy who, for conveniently vague, fill-in-the-blank reasons, is plotting to assassinate the President. The latter is likewise a blank -- no personality, no political party, no politics -- apart from the fact of trailing in the polls and slowly closing the gap in the last weeks of his re-election campaign. Whatever blanks do get filled in are of no real inspiration or interest: a gratuitous hors d'oeuvre of violence at the outset, a handful of bonus murders to fend off audience boredom prior to the climax, a couple of fruitless chases, some facile and easy-to-follow detective work, a disposable sidekick, a female character who is good for some battle-of-the-sexes banter but no full-blown romance. The whole thing, directed undawdlingly by Wolfgang Petersen, is preposterously funneled down into a one-on-one cat-and-mouse game, featuring a very weakly motivated mouse. Without Eastwood in the part of the cat, it would be nothing. With him, it has substance, it has style, it has stature. Not a lot, but as much as a leading man can supply on his own. Rene Russo, Dylan McDermott. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd