THIRTEEN DAYS

For maybe the first hour or so, and in spite of its chillingly totalitarian flag-waving stance, Thirteen Days - Hollywood's first and probably last account of the Cuban Missile Crisis - almost bears the hallmarks of a good gripping political thriller. Starring Kevin Costner as a special assistant to the President, its politically unappealing flavour is initially overcome by a stately visual style and an impressively-maintained sense of tension. Over the course of 145 fucking minutes, however, the unbearable self-righteounessness of Thirteen Days completely overwhelms everything else about it, and to say that it outstays its welcome would be a gross understatement.

It's October 1962, and world peace and stability is suddenly shattered when prez JFK's special advisor Kenny O'Donnell (Costner) is called into the great man's office to be scolded for misleading him to the effect that 'Cuba was nothing to worry about' - the dastardly Soviets, you see, have (allegedly) stockpiled long-range nukes in Havana, and the crisis intensifies apace as Thirteen Days progresses. The film's fatal flaw is a complete sluggishness of pace, and although Costner plods away to reliable effect, what starts out as intriguing soon becomes bombastic and boring.

The movie does, you've got to credit, deliver an admirably skewed-yet-subtle misimpression of American policy, by creating the illusion of a serious substantative division between the Pentagon's military-minded 'hawks' and the White House's bleeding-heart 'doves' - and of course, it's neatly set up in such a way that one is duty-bound to root for the latter. Thus, the film's historical pronouncement on the entire affair is that the saintlike John F. Kennedy (Greenwood) - and his humanitarian advisers (basically Costner and the ineffectual Culp, playing RFK) - somehow managed to neutralise the warlike schemings of a few nasty military officials. It's a theory as far removed from reality as the idea of life on Mars, but a no-doubt-comforting one for the mainstream liberal-American moviegoing public.

Viewers with a particularly rabid interest in the subject should probably take a look, but everyone else should exercise extreme caution.