Power

Power is cast exceedingly well, with director Lumet being one of the best-connected directors in New York. Power gives us the likes of Gene Hackman, Julie Christie, E.G. Marshall, Fritz Weaver and Beatrice Straight in supporting roles! [31 Jan 1986, p.30N]

The action is fast and involving until the three-quarter mark, when the David Himmelstein screenplay loses its focus and everything muddies up. [31 Jan 1986, p.23]

Sidney Lumet's new film does have its absorbing aspects, but it doesn't provide any jolting insights into the pervasive process that turns elections into advertising wars in which candidates come fixing at us like Peter Pepsi and Calvin Coke. [10 Feb 1986, p.79]

Power fails, not because it is badly done; Lumet and an exceptional cast do their best to bring it to life. But they are ultimately defeated by an overplotted script that offers few surprises and no real revelations about today's politics. [17 Feb 1986]

If power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, why is Sidney Lumet’s Power the sexless diatribe that it is, all high-tech visuals and no emotional grounding? Its sole juiciness comes from Gene Hackman as a raffish Southern media consultant, well-cured in bourbon and branch water. The outlandish daring of his performance is almost rave-up enough to recommend the movie. Almost.

It's a clumsy, laughable alarm-ringer from Sidney Lumet, who looks at the power-lunchers and the new right, and shakes his head rather audibly. [31 Jan 1986, p.23]

Full of intriguing possibilities, it is a film propelled by a puff of hot air, not a tornado of brilliantly realized political, philosophical and artistic ideas. Sometimes, it is so embarrassingly bad that one can only laugh and wonder how Lumet could have missed the windmill by so much more than a mile. [31 Jan 1986, p.D9]