If you're going to be robbed, implies this movie, better Luther than some slobbering whippersnapper toting an Uzi. Why, it's practically an honor to be robbed by Luther. He confers his connoisseurship on your booty.
Of course, Luther only goes after the big hauls, and in Absolute Power he's looking to retire by going after the cache of Washington, D.C. billionaire Walter Sullivan (E.G. Marshall) while the old man has vacated his Virginia estate for a Bahamas vacation with his chicklette wife, Christy (Melora Hardin). The film's best sequence is its first: the estate heist. Carefully snipping his way through Sullivan's state-of-the-art security system, Luther takes an almost sensual pleasure from his craft. But then he finds himself inside the vault behind the master bedroom and, with the vault's door doubling as a one-way window, witnesses a crime.
Unexpectedly, Christy has shown up with a soused gent who gets slaphappy with her. He's none other than Alan Richmond (Gene Hackman), the president of the United States. As Luther watches in that aghast, jaw-clenching way that is Eastwood's specialty, two Secret Service agents (Scott Glenn and Dennis Haysbert) splatter her all over the bedroom just as she's about to plunge a letter opener into Richmond's poisonous heart. Heading the ensuing mop-up brigade is Chief of Staff Gloria Russell (Judy Davis), who speaks for everyone when she says, "Do you realize what a shit storm we're in?" (She and Luther have matching clenched jaws.)
But the mop-up is botched; Luther scrams with some crucial evidence in tow. With the president's men (and woman) on his heels, followed by homicide detective Seth Frank (Ed Harris), Luther mulls his options: Skip town or finger the prez.
Eastwood -- who directed from a script by William Goldman loosely based on the 1996 David Baldacci bestseller -- doesn't seem particularly interested in or even aware of the pulp potential in this material. He's gotten it through his noggin that he, too, is an artist (winning an Oscar can do that to you). And he seems equally oblivious to any of the material's "larger" themes. For this movie to have any emotional resonance, the central conflict ought to proceed from the fact that Luther did nothing while a murder was in progress. But Eastwood is not one to flaunt his angst. Any crises of conscience Luther may have are tucked away behind his blankness.
Baldacci's novel has been thoroughly overhauled by Goldman, which is probably just as well. Cluttered with a Grisham-esque plot about a young hotshot lawyer attempting to defend Luther and re-engage Luther's daughter Kate (Laura Linney), the book reads like a steroid-pumped movie treatment. (In fact, it began as a treatment en route to bestsellerdom.) But Goldman just replaces Baldacci's huckster hackerism with his own. The plot has been stripped to its cornball essentials -- Luther and his estranged daughter, a high-powered county prosecutor, represent the film's "heart." Its "head" is Luther's plan for payback. Neither heart nor head seems in the right place.
What Eastwood is really enamored of is Luther's over-the-hill-gang weariness. We're supposed to recognize something "classic" in it. Luther is in a long line of aging movie outlaws who are ennobled by being out of step with the ways of modern crime. (He jokes about his membership in the American Association of Retired Persons.) He may use high-tech equipment, but he still does things the old-fashioned way. He has spent time in prison but has never killed anyone -- except, of course, as a decorated war hero in Korea (no less). For all we can tell, he doesn't even carry a gun on the job. He'd be more likely to carry a sketchpad.
Eastwood is always at his best when he's at his most hard-bitten. His lean wolfishness can be forthrightly scary. But whenever he tries to show off the tenderness behind the blankness, as in The Bridges of Madison County or Absolute Power, the effect is wearying -- and baffling. Watching Eastwood's Robert Kincaid in Madison County, I kept expecting his rugged politesse to crack into full-blown Dirty Harry psychoses. (Madison County is much more enjoyable if you think of it as Dirty Harry Goes Undercover in Iowa.) His Luther doesn't show the effects of a life lived on the edge; his solitariness isn't spooky, it's blah. Eastwood is a flat-footed romantic, with "heartfelt" line readings that make him seem audio-animatronic.