Costa-Gavras reworks Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole (a/k/a The Big Carnival) for the age of television. The situation in the 1951 film was a man trapped in a caved-in mine; the situation now is a hostage crisis in the Museum of Natural History; but in both cases the situation is inflamed and prolonged by a down-on-his-luck reporter looking for a return ticket to the Big Time. Plenty of the well-documented excesses of TV news are on display in recognizable and unexaggerated form; and William Atherton, in the role of the local news anchor, manages to be fully unctuous without actually dribbling oil in his tracks or setting off any red warning lights on his dashboard. But a heavy didactic hand is nevertheless in evidence from the very first moments. And both of the principal roles are severely compromised, possibly in an attempt to attract, or appease, stars of the magnitude of Dustin Hoffman and John Travolta. Hoffman, apparently disinclined to forget that he was once Carl Bernstein on the trail of Tricky Dick (it's not his character alone who has nostalgia for the Big Time), undergoes a startling transformation whereby his scrappy little self-seeker, after the arrival of a bigger bulldozing self-seeker from the national network (Alan Alda), becomes by comparison the voice of caring and compassion, sanity and common sense, truth and enlightenment. It rings sour. And Travolta, given the impossible job of drumming up sympathy for a desperado who imprisons a class of field-tripping grade-schoolers under threat of shotgun and dynamite, adopts a dumb-lug comic persona too broad and light for the circumstances. With Mia Kirshner, Blythe Danner, Ted Levine. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd