Clintosaurus Rex

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLE: IN THE LINE OF FIRE

DIRECTOR: WOLFGANG PETERSEN

WRITER: JEFF MCGUIRE

THE BOTTOM LINE: Eastwood has a battle of wits with a brilliant assassin.

Clint Eastwood has always been an old man. Even in the '60s, as the gunslinger in Sergio Leone westerns, Eastwood had the squinty eyes, sour mouth and weary walk of a soldier who had been in too many wars. The six-day stubble hid countless psychic scars; the cigar butt stuck between his teeth suggested a world gone up in smoke; the poncho he wore could have been a shroud. As Dirty Harry and a passel of creepy cowboys, Eastwood carried himself with the slow, wily grace of the living dead. Idealism had been blasted out of him -- only a grim irony stirred inside. Unforgiven, his Oscar winner and $100 million smash, was not a valedictory to the Clint persona; it was the latest verse in a career-long elegy to the faded American Dream.

Next stanza: In the Line of Fire, a just-above-par melodrama about a Secret Service agent haunted by having botched his protection of John F. Kennedy nearly 30 years ago in Dallas and now assigned to shield the current President from a would-be assassin. Frank Horrigan (Eastwood) is your basic borderline burn-out with questionable social skills. He's a beast from the past, Clintosaurus rex, who believes that the things he knows about people will compensate for his diminished physical resources. His opponent, Mitch Leary (John Malkovich), is your basic twisted genius, a rogue warrior with dead eyes and a killer grudge.

The movie can exasperate when it embraces -- and this is the last time we'll point this out, Hollywood, so listen up -- the cockamamie conventions of the thriller genre: the buddy-partner who announces his retirement, then dies violently; the smart female officer who's around for window dressing and romantic relief; the pot-bellied villain who is more athletic than the slim, trim hero; and the mandatory climactic chase, in which the bad guy loads his gun, the good guy careers across town, and the moviegoer checks his watch.

At heart, though, In the Line of Fire is a conversation between two sides of a smart, troubled mind. In a series of phone chats, Leary toys with Horrigan, hovers like a dark angel or a guilty conscience, lets the agent see his fun- house mirror image in an assassin's paranoid logic. Why kill the President? "To punctuate the dreariness." At the end of the cold war and the American century, Leary says, "there's no cause left worth fighting for. All that's left is the game. I'm on offense; you're on defense."

The real battle here is between two generations of acting styles: meticulous method vs. star quality. On offense is Malkovich the master thespian, building a character with wigs and fake noses, gunning the menace by alternating a spooky stillness with violent shifts of his wispy, lispy voice. On defense is Clint the listener, the reactor, whose worn, handsome face is his technique. In these moments, you see agitated Actor and aging Star in a hot war of wits. The shoot-out is wonderful to watch.