Travolta's role is pure dynamite

YOU know where this film is going from the opening shots - television journalists load their cameras like guns, hunters waiting for their prey to emerge from the undergrowth.

Mad City tells the tale of an embittered former museum guard who takes drastic measures in a bid to get his job back. It also tells the story of an embittered former cutting-edge television journalist who gets caught up in the action and sees it as his chance of getting back into the big time. Both have lost their jobs. One isn't prepared to sit there and take it.

But there is more, so much more, bubbling away under the surface of this multi-layered movie - comments on the way individual members of the press manipulate events to further their own ends; notes on how the general public will interpret an event in the way it sees fit; and the fact that, no matter how skilled a person is, the press will always do what it damn well pleases.

Central to the whole shebang are two great performances from Dustin Hoffman as the journalist Max Brackett, and John Travolta as the museum guard Sam Baily.

Uneducated Sam takes a gun and a bag of dynamite to the town museum in a bid to reason with his former boss and get his job back. If that seems a little extreme, then Sam is soon made to realise it when he accidentally shoots a guard and inadvertently takes a group of school-children hostage.

Max, in the meantime, is in the gents having just filed a report for the local television station at which he now works. At first he finds himself to be a hostage, but manipulates Sam into agreeing that he should be Sam's negotiator and have exclusive, world rights on the biggest breaking story of his career.

The two leads are wonderfully drawn characters. Hoffman's bitter, ambitious, desperate Max eventually rediscovers the sensitive side that led to his blowing a report of an aircraft crash live on air several years before. It's not a gradual transition. The metaphorical slap to the face that eventually leads him to realise the error of his ways is nothing less than an infuriated audience wants to give him. It's a lovely piece of writing and pacing. Max, after all, begins the film scolding a trainee who helps the shot guard by saying: "You have to decide whether you want to be the news, or record it."

Travolta, as ever, shines as Sam. Director Costa-Gravas has to do a similar job to Max in the movie - he must create empathy for Sam from the audience, but still show that the guy is only a shuffle away from being retarded and psychotic. He would not have done that without Travolta who seems to be able to absorb any role like a sponge. There is nothing about his performance to suggest anything other than the fact that Sam is a deeply complex person in a situation he did not foresee. His heartfelt desire to just go home and see his wife and kids is heartbreaking.

While the relationship between these two develops, Max is having to contend with his former reporting partner Kevin Hollander (Alan Alda) who went on from the aircraft crash report to be one of the most powerful newsmen in the country. Hollander's jealousy at his former partner's sudden lump of luck is a wonderful dynamic to throw in the proceedings.

Mad City is a thoroughly involving film and a little upsetting. The plot seems to take a deep breath before the end and sags a little, but the Hoffman/Travolta partnership carries it through.

Jeremy Austin

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