Under Fire Movie

This gripping, emotional story of a roving photographer's transformation from a neutral artist with a camera to an involved human rights activist with a camera begins in Chad, travels to Nicaragua in the early 1980s, and ends when the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza takes off for the palm trees and beaches of Florida. Nick Nolte brilliantly interprets his role as the photographer Russell Price, and Joanna Cassidy is Claire, the radio journalist he meets while in Chad, along with her lover, Time Magazine reporter Alex (Gene Hackman), who ends up opting for a plush job as a TV anchorman and a quiet life on Long Island. When Alex leaves, Claire heads off to the next hot spot, Nicaragua, and Russell decides to tag along -- not because he is that interested in Nicaragua, but because he is interested in Claire. Once in the war-torn, Central American country, it does not take Russell long to see the vast difference between the corrupt, U.S.-backed dictatorship and the struggling guerrilla forces who have been fighting for a decade already. As his eyes are opened, he and Claire decide to go along with the rebels and film their fighting behind the lines. During one battle, the much-venerated rebel leader is shot dead, and Russell reluctantly agrees to fake a photo of the man as though he were still living, so as not to demoralize the army that looks up to him for leadership. The photo appears in the news around the world and causes such a furor that Alex shows up to demand an interview with the leader for national American television. It is on the way to this supposed interview that Alex leaves the car for a moment and is senselessly shot and killed by a government soldier, the whole episode filmed for the world by Russell's camera. This outrage (which actually occurred when journalist Bill Stewart was inhumanly shot by a Somoza soldier in full view of the video camera) soon makes global news and helps to hasten the overthrow of the corrupt dictatorship. Meanwhile, Russell has new issues to consider once his camera has become an "active" and not a "passive" observer of political unrest. René Enriquéz who plays the dictator Somoza in this film is a native Nicaraguan, related to a newspaper reporter killed by Somoza's government.

Nick Nolte stars as photojournalist Russell Price in Roger Spottiswoode's occasionally interesting but ultimately unsatisfying film on the Nicaraguan civil war of the early '80s. Like nearly every Hollywood film dealing with war, this one includes an obligatory romance, in this case a triangle, which like his later political film No Way Out (1987), also involves Gene Hackman. As admirable as the film may have been in criticizing American interests for aligning themselves with the corrupt regime of Anastasio Somoza, it never really spells out the full extent of his family's corruption or the brutality of his dictatorship. Still, it's at least willing to identify the nation's sequestered plutocrats as the source of its problems. In a film which consists mainly of Nolte and radio journalist Joanna Cassidy running from one battle to another, their characters are barely developed and their romance is little more than an afterthought. If it fails as drama though, it succeeds in a semi-documentary mode, as one of the very few features which have focused on the physical and moral hazards of the life of a combat photographer. Similarly, Ed Harris' mercenary offers an incisive thumbnail sketch of that profession's malleability. The excellent cast is as good as the mediocre script permits, and the highly underrated Cassidy shines.