king of conspiracy theories

Rating: 7/10 (16 August 2004)

The buzz created by this 'what if?' questioning of the Kennedy assassination led to a lot of negative press junking Oliver Stone's film as overheated tosh. Using the real-life theories of Jim Garrison (played winningly here by Kevin Costner) the movie delves into all sorts of conspiracy theories involving multiple gunmen, duped decoys, split identities, and government cover-ups.
Taken as a whole the film is watchable and pervasive, sowing serious doubts on the 'lone gunman' explanation of the murder. Lee Harvey Oswald (another memorable performance from Gary Oldman) is seen as a patsy who died for the will of a much higher power; his murder so soon after that of Kennedy smacks of fanaticism and a need for the real killers to sell him out as the sacrificial lamb. This is where Garrison's story is coming from.
In the cast we find Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Bacon, Jack Lemmon, Donald Sutherland (in an electrifying and impenetrable cameo), and Sissy Spacek all contributing to a tightly written drama of disparate theories that don't quite come together. As entertainment, all this works fine. As an attempt to rewrite history, it is perhaps too unwieldy to be of any real use.