Executive Action

Set in 1963, Executive Action follows a group of mysterious figures, including Burt Lancaster’s James Farrington and Robert Ryan’s Robert Foster, as they methodically plot the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Director David Miller, working from Dalton Trumbo’s screenplay, delivers a slow-moving and often excessively talky drama that admittedly does boast a small handful of pleasures, as the movie benefits substantially from the uniformly stirring efforts of an impressively talented cast – with, especially, Lancaster turning in precisely the sort of sturdy, commanding performance for which he was known. (It doesn’t hurt, either, that the film boasts an assortment of such stellar periphery players as Will Geer and Ed Lauter.) The exposition-heavy bent of Trumbo’s script admittedly does result in a handful of lulls throughout the 91 minute running time, with the viewer often left overwhelmed by the rather incessant barrage of information proffered by the blacklisted screenwriter (ie the picture almost demands a pre-existing interest in the Kennedy murder and the various conspiracy theories surrounding it). There’s little doubt, then, that Executive Action‘s strongest portion is the assassination itself, as the dialogue-free sequence packs a far more potent and flat-out tense punch than one might’ve naturally assumed – which ultimately cements the movie’s place as an erratic yet fairly watchable bit of 1970s conspiracy filmmaking.

**1/2 out of ****