Amazon.co.uk Review
Mad City is an earnest effort at media criticism that's never convincing enough to stir a viewer's outrage in the way filmmaker Costa-Gavras (Music Box) might have intended. John Travolta plays a barely educated museum guard who is laid off from his job and ends up holding his former boss (Blythe Danner) and a bunch of schoolchildren hostage. Dustin Hoffman is a former television-network journalist making a grab at the limelight again by pushing and controlling press coverage of the story.
What follows is by the numbers and not nearly as enlightening or enthralling as other films (such as Dog Day Afternoon or Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole) about simple events manipulated into a media circus. Despite Travolta's tragic performance and Hoffman's impassioned one, the film breaks up over efforts to blame electronic voyeurism for social chaos. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com
DVD Description
DVD Features:
Interactive menus
Scene Access
Languages: English, French and Italian, Dolby Digital 5.1
Subtitles: English, French, Italian, Dutch, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Romanian, Bulgarian.
Hearing impaired: English, Italian.
2.35:1 widescreen
From the Back Cover
Dustin Hoffman and John Travolta team with award-winning filmmaker Costa Gavras (Z, Missing) in a fierce tale of ratings-driven TV news gone mad. Travolta is Sam, a misguided museum guard who loses his job, then tries to get it back at gunpoint. Hoffman is Max, a local TV reporter taken hostage with schoolchildren when Sam locks down the musuem. It's a desperate move for sam, a career move for Max. He's on the inside of a live exclusive. Now he must give Sam's story a heroic spin, keep a cynical network anchor (Alan Alda) at bay and above all, keep America watching. And as Max pulls the strings, the stakes grow higher, darker, madder.
