Murder at 1600 (1997)

i must have seen a different film!!

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Taut thriller with Wesley Snipes investigating a murder at the White House.The picture becomes much more engaging then first realized. There are some very good performances and political intrigue abounds with the discovery that the first family was there when the killing occurred. It also becomes exciting when we find out that the first son is quite a Lothario and his father, the president, could be under suspicion as well.Diane Lane is effective as a CIA operative and we see how crude the latter organization can be.Alan Alda does some scene stealing acting as a presidential adviser with plenty on his mind.It's not "The Manchurian Candidate" but it's an effective film.

This film is based on a novel by Margaret Truman, daughter of President Harry Truman and First Lady Bess Truman. For some reason, she is not given credit here on IMDb for the work that this film is based on.As to the movie itself, I would agree that in certain ways it would be somewhat implausible, yet I still find it quite entertaining, and easy to watch any time it pops up on TV, these days in High Def, looking far better then it has in years. I like Wesley Snipes - persistent, a pain in the behind, never willing to give up with so much at stake. And I find that Diane Lane is at her best here - not trying to be attractive, yet amazingly so, showing that she can and ought to be an action adventure type of actor as much as any other type of work that she gets into. And after all the lies and other nonsense that has come out of the Nixon, Reagan and Dubya administrations, maybe this doesn't seem all that impossible after all.

Finally caught this on Peachtree-TBS. I have to agree that the screenplay seems like it came off an assembly-line, and there are too many times where the viewers are asked to suspend their belief. Too bad, because the cast is excellent. I'm always glad to see Dennis Miller in a supporting role, and Daniel Benzali has a mesmerizing screen presence (he was the lead attorney on that highly-watchable 'Murder-One' TV show a few years back), but he is largely wasted here, muttering lines such as "You'll tell us if he tries to contact you?". Dan: you're the head of Security at the White House, you're supposed to know what's going' on. (Just ask the guys over at the Bourne Identity franchise).Also, we have a bumbling gang of Secret Service agents who keep letting their prey escape, the back door being the escapee's avenue of choice. A Tom Clancy novel this ain't.However, Wesley Snipes IS superb - he almost saves the day here. His Washington homicide cop is the only character that gets a bit of development. Nice chemistry between him and Diane Lane.And there's action, and some suspense. Despite the wooden story, I found it compelling that a pending conflict with North Korea serves as a background for the unfolding events. So, I watched it and didn't have a bad time... but I still think the character development and pure storytelling in almost any British TV detective show is 'heads n shoulders' above this. *sigh*

MURDER AT 1600 came near the end of Wesley Snipes' theatrical career, before he went STV, and it is a decent-enough, Canadian-lensed thriller about the discovery of a young woman's brutally murdered body in the White House. Could the president's bully of a son (Tate Donovan) have killed her? Or are there more sinister forces at work here? For better or worse, the identity of the killer is made plain just past the halfway mark. But that doesn't mean you can't go along for the ride as shadowy assassins try to keep Snipes, as a D.C. detective, and Diane Lane, as a sympathetic Secret Service agent, from uncovering the truth. Snipes is in tip top shape here and is surrounded by several great character actors: Ronny Cox as the president, Harris Yulin as a hawkish general and Alan Alda as a presidential adviser. Daniel Benzali, who some of you might remember from a short-lived TV crime show some years ago, is on hand as a senior Secret Service agent and Dennis Miller has a small role as a fellow D.C. detective. While MURDER AT 1600 is not a first-rate action film -- for one thing, it is chock full of tired plot devices -- it is certainly watchable. And it beats anything Snipes has done since going STV.