StepLuvX This is a movie that takes nuclear brinkmanship and adds a few twists. I'm not a low budget film fan at all, but this movie is one of those that will make you forget about the budget & will have you so immersed that it will just leave you mouthing the "WOW" (or some variation of that) at the end of the film. Although the movie is a bit dated now, it still ranks as one of the best examples of what it really takes to make a great movie... simply great acting & directing. Very few movies make my best movie list, Kevin Pollack has 2 movies on that list (the other being "The Usual Suspects")which is a feat in & of itself.

changedname This is one of the absolute WORST movies I have ever seen.It's about nuclear weapons and avoiding World War III, how could they possibly mess it up? The mere mention of a megaton bomb is enough to get most hearts racing. Well I don't know either, but they did.The lead actor, the President CANNOT ACT!!!! In fact nobody in this movie is much good at acting. The whole thing is an unbelievable farce from start to finish.You can see all the stupid ideas they threw in supposed to show how things work and how things go wrong and how they're all human. They are so stupid and they have things that couldn't POSSIBLY take place, that I am unable to find words for it. And every "feeling" that they tried to create is completely transparent and blindingly obvious, it's insulting to our intelligence as much as anything.Suddenly out of nowhere there'd be this close-up and dark music played. The whole film is a joke and I have NO IDEA where all the decent ratings are coming from.

Theo Robertson Often you have to suspend disbelief in order for a cinematic story to work and I think I'm right in saying all screen writing gurus agree you're allowed to get away with one implausibility/coincidence in your story . In DETTERENCE this would probably mean that the Iraqis would be able to mobilize their entire armed forces without the Americans noticing , allowing the president to trapped in a diner during a snowstorm . I'd be the first to admit that this takes some swallowing but if you watch a film too closely then very few films you see will ever work so let's ignore the unlikeliness of it Unfortunately what happens next is that the audience become more and more aware of factual errors and implausibilities throughout the running time . We're told that Iraq " has sent three divisions ...half a million men into Kuwait " I'm fairly certain that in military circles a division is composed of 8,000 to 10,000 troops not 133,000 as stated here . The President decides to nuke Iraq but since Iraq also has nuclear weapons there's a danger of a nuclear counterstrike . This is the main stumbling block with DETERRENCE because it's impossible to believe the Iraqi regime would ever be allowed to posses such an arsenal . And if that leaves you scratching your head wait till it's revealed at the end that America and France were responsible for supplying the Iraqis with the bomb " so that Iraq wouldn't be able to manufacture its own nuclear deterrent " ! Let me think , America and France will supply Iraq with nuclear warheads and a delivery system so that the Iraqis won't manufacture their own weapons of mass destruction . When you've got something as ridiculously illogical as that in your screenplay then it's easy to miss other factual errors like a B-2 bomber being confused with a F-111 , Baghdad having a population of 12 million people or stock footage of Baghdad being in the center of the Pacific ocean as it's destroyed by a 100 megaton bomb I'm sure writer/director Rod Lurie originally conceived this story for the stage . It's impossible to watch this thinking it's a cinematic movie and alas Lurie has written his characters as stereotypes such as the hick redneck , the angry blackman etc . It's not helped either that the cast give far from compelling performances . Hutton may be excused for slapping his head too often because that's how I reacted to the unconvincing dialogue while Kevin Pollack doesn't come across as being very presidential but that is the point - his character isn't supposed to be presidential at all . But there's far better , more realistic movies similar to this like FAIL SAFE which was made during the cold war where the premise was so compelling because it was frighteningly realistic . Realistic isn't an adjective I can use for DETERRENCE

jbf-5 In order for a techno-thriller to work, it must at least be plausible enough for us to be willing to suspend belief. This film has absolutely no feel or understanding of even the most basic features of its subject matter. It tries to fake credibility while throwing around ridiculous non-facts such as a 100 megaton bomb, a B2 stealth bomber being casually tracked by Iraqi radar, a TV communications satellite that somehow is equipped with not only a real time TV camera but one that films ground level shots. When the movie shows a clip of the B2, we instead see an F-117 which looks absolutely nothing like a B2. The super duper satellite (actually just one of a small constellation of satellites the TV network supposedly owns) seems to be able to warp back 50 years at will because it captures familiar black and white footage that is obviously from one of the early H-bomb test in the Pacific Ocean. This is more remarkable still as the explosion is supposed to be taking place in the middle of a desert.The President and his advisors are playing out their full intercontinental nuclear game of brinksmanship in a little over an hour, and yet still have time to chat up the morons repeatedly at length in the diner. For some inexplicable reason the morons, including one gun toting one, have not been sent packing by the Secret Service but instead are allowed to butt into and sidetrack negotiations between heads of state in which tens of millions of lives are at stake. The only moron who is even mildly rebuked is a ludicrous right wing homophobic bigoted anti-Semite cardboard character of the sort only a Hollywood provincial pinhead could believe exists out there in fly-over land.All these features seem to be in the film to give it heft and credibility so that it can go about preaching some kind of demented apocalyptic message to us. In the course of their proselytizing, the films writers have their President off handily incinerate a large city of mostly innocents in order to demonstrate what a peace loving mensch he is.Alfred Hitchcock thought that actors were some of God's dumbest creatures. He obviously never met any of the writers, producers, or director of this film.