He's A Cop, She's An Agent
Now Playing: MURDER AT 1600
Don’t ask me how I’ve managed to miss this loopy thriller up to now, but 1997’s MURDER AT 1600 is one of the most delightfully bad movies I’ve seen in awhile. It has a delicious premise—sexy young woman is found murdered in a White House restroom—and an oddball cast of supporting actors that may have been picked at random from a casting director’s “old white guys” binder. Under the direction of schlockmeister Dwight Little, the action scenes are serviceable and the pacing flows well…so well that you might occasionally forget how ludicrous the plot is.

Wesley Snipes stars as Harlan Regis (!), a Washington, D.C. homicide detective (a part reportedly earmarked for Bruce Willis) who is summoned to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to investigate a murder. A beautiful young blonde is found stabbed to death in the White House, and a janitor is quickly arrested. Of course, he couldn’t be the killer, because he isn’t played by a name actor (and the movie would be over), but Regis’ attempts to look into the victim’s personal life are stonewalled by the Secret Service. Daniel Benzali (MURDER ONE) portrays the head of the Secret Service, and Alan Alda (M*A*S*H) is the President’s National Security Advisor. We know this because there’s actually a scene where the two men say to each other, “I run the Secret Service.” “And I’m the National Security Advisor.” Obviously, the two men know this already, but, as if they realize they’re being watched by an audience, they graciously introduce themselves for us.

Also here is Diane Lane as Nina Chance, apparently the only non-sinister Secret Service agent on staff. Little establishes early on that Nina won an Olympic gold medal in sharpshooting—no prize for guessing whether that skill comes into play later on. The Presidential-looking Ronny Cox (ROBOCOX) plays the wimp Chief Executive, who refuses to send U.S. troops into North Korea to rescue American hostages, against the wishes of his entire staff and Cabinet. The strangest casting choice is Dennis Miller, who spent the mid-1990’s popping up in mainstream movies as the wisecracking best pal/sacrificial lamb that you knew was going to end up dead or maimed by the end of the movie. Here he’s Steve Stengel, Wesley’s partner who spends most of his time sleeping or watching TV while Snipes is out investigating the murder. Miller’s job is to fill in extraneous plot information and to get shot, giving the hero a personal motive to solve the case.

Perhaps the film’s wackiest scene takes place in Snipes’ apartment. It’s established that Wesley is a history buff who has built a huge scale model of 19th-century Washington, D.C. that takes up his entire living room. Again, no prize for guessing that this unusual skill will eventually come into play. He comes home one night and notices a couple of his little figures have fallen to the floor. Hmmm, how could that have happened? Then he finds a bolt on the floor. He looks up to see a heating grid in the ceiling. This ceiling is very high off the floor, and as we see in a later scene, can only be reached by ladder. Wesley figures there must be a prowler in his pad, so he pulls his piece and wanders around. In the bedroom, he sees an open window and wet footprints (it’s raining out) leading away from it. He follows the prints into the bathroom and is ambushed by the burglar, leading to a fight and a chase. The intruder was sent by the Secret Service to bug Wesley’s apartment, but the absurdity of the scene—never mind that the guy could never have reached the vent and that he sure did a terrible job of covering his tracks—lies in the footprints. So what happened? The guy heard Wesley and started to leave via the window? Stepped outside, then changed his mind, came back in, and hid in the bathroom, leaving an easy trail for Snipes to follow?

The writing gets even more howlingly funny, as we find out that the White House is accessible through secret underground passages built by Abraham Lincoln as a potential escape route from invading Confederate troops. The killer turns out to be the one character not an obvious red herring, as they always are in these films. The killer’s motive is completely ridiculous, as the murder is revealed to be just one part of an elaborate Goldbergian scenario that would require an enormous amount of planning—off the top of your head, you can probably think of a dozen easier ways the character could achieve the same ultimate goal. And the climax is revealed to be completely senseless, if you think about it. There’s no reason Snipes and Lane have to risk their lives the way they do; like the killer, there are a dozen ways they could successfully achieve their mission that are safer and easier.

It's not quite in COLOR OF NIGHT territory as far as its badness goes--what could be?--but it's still damn funny.