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Roger Donaldson (1945), born in Australia but emigrated to New Zealand,
debuted with Sleeping Dogs (1977) and directed Nutcase (1980),
Smash Palace (1982),
The Bounty (1984), a remake of Lewis Milestone's Mutiny on the Bounty,
and Marie (1985).
His first major film was the political thriller No Way Out (1987).
His screenplay is a madcap puzzle full of suspenseful turns, although the
directing and the acting are not always up to it.
The film opens with a naval officer, Tom, being interrogated about his friendship with
the secretary of defense, David. The film is a flashback that shows how they met.
Tom is invited to a party, presided by the president himself.
His best friend Scott wants to introduce him to the secretary of defense, but Davd is busy and cold. Scott is David's right-hand man. On the other hand, Tom is immediately seduced by an attractive young woman, Susan. They leave the party together and have sex right away.
Clearly, she's a "loose" woman.
Later Tom becomes a hero when he saves a fellow sailor from drowning.
David reads about it in the newspaper and decides to hire him as his assistant.
Tom is quickly introduced to the dirty politics of Washington: a senator wants
to fund the project of a submarine that David considers a waste of time, and David keeps secrets from the CIA.
Tom meets again his friend Sam, a good man who is paraplegic but is also
a computer geek and runs the the Pentagon's data-processing center.
Tom has sex again with Susan, but she tells him that she is
David's lover: the lover of his boss.
Tom and Susan spend a romantic weekend out of town. David finds out that she
has left town and shows up angry, demanding to know with whom.
Tom is in the house and has to sneak out in the dark. David only sees someone
staring at him when he walks into the house but doesn't recognize him.
Susan refuses to tell David who is the other man and David loses his temper.
He assaults her and she falls to her death.
David tells Scott the truth. Scott is loyal like a lover. Scott heads to Susan's place and removes all incriminating evidence. He then fabricates a story
according to which she was killed by a Russian spy code-named Yuri.
Later the police search the apartment for clues and find the negative of a photograph that Susan took of Tom.
Scott now needs to find and kill this Yuri.
The police asks Sam to scan the negative with the computer to reconstruct its image. Sam tells them that it will take days.
Not knowing that Tom is Susan's other lover, Scott informs Tom that Susan has been killed by "Yuri" and that their mission is find Yuri.
Under shock, Tom is unable to speak for a while but then accepts to participate
in the search for Yuri, knowing that Yuri is actually him himself.
Scott takes Tom to visit
Susan's best friend Nina, who knows well whom Susan was seeing (Tom) but doesn't betray him to Scott. But she makes the mistake to mention that Susan was
David's lover.
If Nina spoke to the police, it would not only create a scandal but also make
David the suspect.
Tom senses that Scott is the likely assassin and senses that Scott now wants
to eliminate Nina to protect David.
Scott in fact sends two hitmen to kill Nina. Tom confronts them and helps
Nina escape in time.
Tom starts secretly investigating himself to find evidence that would pin the
murder on David. The only thing he has is a gift that David gave Susan, a jewel box from Morocco.
Tom begs Sam to help find in the computer the information about who got that
box from Morocco.
Sam is willing to do anything for Tom but demands to know what is going on.
Tom then confesses that he is the man that they are looking for, the other man who was seeing Susan. Tom tells Sam that the negative will eventually reveal
his own face and begs Sam to delay the computer process.
Meanwhile, Scott's men have discovered where Susan spent the weekend. They find two people who saw Susan and her lover (the presumed "Yuri") on that weekend and escort them to the Pentagon. One of them sees Tom passing by and shouts that Yuri is right there in the Pentagon.
Scott launches a mass search to find that person, except that only the two witnesses can recognize him. Tom hides from them while still pretending to be helping with the investigation.
Sam delivers to Tom the proof that he needed: the jewel box was given by Morocco to David, and was found in Susan's apartment.
Sam is so worried about Tom that he decides to tell Scott, assuming that Scott is Tom's best friend. And so Scott discovers that Tom knows that Davis is the killer and that Tom is trying to frame David.
And now Sam knows too.
Scott does not hesitate to kill Sam.
Scott is clearly homosexual and madly in love with David, willing to do anything to save David from jail and political ruin.
Scott now wants to pin Sam's murder on Tom as well as Susan's murder.
Tom confronts David with his Moroccan proof. David freaks out and comes up with
an absurd story that Scott killed Susan because he was jealous of her.
Scott, devastated by David's betrayal, kills himself in front of them.
Tom sends the Moroccan proof to a political enemy of David who will be happy to ruin David.
Some time later Tom is visiting Susan's tomb. Russian agents kidnap him and take him to the house of the first scene. The Russian boss (who was acting as Tom's
landlord) interrogates him. We realize that, by sheer accident, Tom was indeed Yuri, sent to seduce Susan in order to obtain secrets from David.
The Russians now want him to return to
the Soviet Union, but Tom, sincerely shaken by what happened to Susan, refuses and resigns.
Then came
Cocktail (1988),
Cadillac Man (1990),
White Sands (1992),
and
the remake of The Getaway (1994).
Species (1995) is a horror/sci-fi movie that recycles stereotypes of
the genres with a cruel twist.
Sil is a girl who apparently lives in a cage.
Xavier is a scientist who orders to inject a lethal gas into the cage (a tear
betrays a passing emotion). The execution fails because the girl breaks the
cage and runs. She escapes from the top-security facility and jumps on a
train. The scientist unleashes a massive manhunt. On the train, the girl
uses her impressive strength to get what she needs.
While the scientist assembles an emergency team that looks like an episode of
Star Trek (a hunter, a psychic and two scientists), the girl mutates
into a giant breathing jelly cocoon (that looks like the monster from
Aliens) and literally sucks a female conductor.
Xavier explains to his team that Sil was the product of a genetic experiment:
an extraterrestrial civilization sent the recipe to build a superior being,
and Sil, raised in a cage, was the result. When the scientists decided to
terminate the experiment, she escaped. Now she is dangerous because she could
multiply rapidly and lead to the destruction of the human race.
By the time the train reaches Los Angeles, Sil has morphed into a sexy blonde
wearing the conductor's uniform.
While Xavier's team chases her, Sil is obviously dying to mate.
She is living bait.
Sil is run over by a car and seduces the man who takes her to the hospital.
Alerted by the hospital that a woman healed terrible wounds in seconds,
the team arrives on the spot just seconds before she has sex with the man.
She kills the man and escapes.
They track her down again and this time the car that she is driving explodes.
Xavier believes she is dead but she is not. She's in the same hotel where
they are staying: she just dyed her hair black.
She enters the room of the male scientist and spies the hunter have sex with
the female scientist in the next room. The psychic "feels" her and gives the
alarm, but it is too late: she has already copulated with the male scientist,
gotten pregnant and killed him.
The surviving team chases her into a cave, where she gives birth to a child
(who debuts by sucking a rat). After a struggle, they manage to burn alive
both the mom and the child. They leave the cave and don't notice a rat that
is behaving like the beings they just destroyed...
Then came the disaster movie Dante's Peak (1997),
the historical movie Thirteen Days (2000),
The Recruit (2003),
The World's Fastest Indian (2005),
The Bank Job (2008),
Seeking Justice (2011) and
The November Man (2014).
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