
Silly romp ‘Chasing Liberty’ offers sappy motivation, brainless plot
By CRAIG OUTHIER
Get Out
In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit to harboring a secret fantasy involving Mandy Moore, Amanda Bynes and Hilary Duff. Relax, it's not what you're thinking.
Whenever enjoined to watch a horrendous specimen of perfume-laced garbage such as "Chasing Liberty" — which is frequently, I tells ya — I think how superb it would be if someone pit these young actresses against each other in a "Running Man"-style death match, armed only with cans of Aquanet and cigaratte lighters. This isn't a gender-bias thing — I often feel the same way about Adam Sandler and Rob Schneider.
Anyway, it's Moore — the elder statesperson of Hollywood's current sorority of talent-free teen it-girls — who is front-and-center in "Chasing Liberty," a spiritually cavernous First Daughter fantasy where Moore ("How to Deal") sneaks away from her cloistered, motorcade lifestyle so she can rub elbows with common folk and — to be perfectly blunt — get laid. Somewhere, Jenna Bush is raising a clenched fist of solidarity.
The movie begins how these movies often do, with 18-year-old presidential daughter Anna Foster (secret service codename: Liberty) bopping around partially clothed in her corner bedroom at the White House to the tune of Tom Petty's "American Girl." An intriguing musical selection, that, since the last time it was employed in a major motion picture was by Jonathan Demme in "Silence of the Lambs," right before the Senator's daughter was kidnapped and forced to self-administer body lotion by the odious serial killer Jame Gumb. Could a similar fate be in store for Anna?
We wish. Instead, she goes on a date with a tweedy, Mustang-driving classmate, which ends disastrously (i.e. no kiss) when the Secret Service jumps in and cuts it short. Anna blames her overly circumspect dad (Mark Harmon, stiff and arrogant), but she should blame herself for going out with a guy who has a buddy stupid enough to approach the President's daughter in a crowded restaurant and reach into his coat, assassin-style. Naturally, he was was only reaching for a camera.
And therein lies the tumor that ultimately kills "Chasing Liberty" — nobody really is that stupid. They only are in this movie. Director Andy Cadiff (a veteran of numerous TV shows) and first-time screenwriters Derek Guiley and David Schneiderman have a place to go — romance, rebellion, Europe — and they really don't care how many fanciful lies they have to tell, or how many tulips of common sense they have to skip over to get there.
Ultimately, Anna does indeed go to Europe, accompanying her father on an official state visit to Prague. When dad breaks his promise to assign only two bodyguards to her person, the poor suffocated girl snaps. At the urging of the French Prime Minister's vampy daughter (Beatrice Rosen), Anna slips her Secret Service leash at a concert and steals away into the crisp Czech night, a free woman. Quickly, she meets a handsome British photographer (newcomer Matthew Goode) who chaperones her across Europe, including visits to Venice and Berlin.
It's a perfect teen dream, but only half as puerile as a romantic subplot between a pair of Secret Service agents played by Annabella Sciorra (‘‘Jungle Fever’’) and Jeremy Piven (‘‘PCU’’). She's frigid, he's a randy goofball, and won't one of them please take a bullet?
As a character, Anna talks smart (she holds forth on Italian opera on several occasions, that plucky little Ivy League-bound minx) but the issues that really drive her are shopping mall banal: she wants more freedom from daddy. How more interesting "Chasing Liberty" might have been if Anna also had a few political differences with her dad — like his decision to bomb the Australians or relax emissions controls or something of that nature. Wrong movie, I guess.
Without giving away too much, know that there is a plot twist early on that plays Anna for something of a chump, and it's a measure of the movie's badness that we never feel the slightest bit bad for her. Maybe we will in ‘‘First Daughter,’’ an identical project starring Katie Holmes (due later this year) that features precisely the same plot twist. Obviously, it's not only great minds that think alike.
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