Pete St. John, a ruthless and highly successful media consultant, is juggling a couple of other political candidates when asked to join the campaign of wealthy but little-known Ohio businessman Jerome Cade, who hopes to win the Senate seat being vacated by St. John's friend Sam Hastings. He comes into conflict with Arnold Billings, a public relations expert whose firm Cade has hired. St. John's investigation into Cade's background prompts Billings to retaliate by bugging St. John's office phones, flooding the basement of his headquarters, tampering with his private jet, and interfering with his other clients. These actions force St. John to take a hard look at himself and what he has become and to decide whether his ex-wife Ellen Freeman and his former partner Wilfred Buckley are right in believing that his success is due primarily to the exploitation of others.
Cast
Richard Gere as Pete St. John
Julie Christie as Ellen Freeman
Gene Hackman as Wilfred Buckley
Kate Capshaw as Sydney Betterman
Denzel Washington as Arnold Billings
E. G. Marshall as Senator Sam Hastings
Beatrice Straight as Claire Hastings
Fritz Weaver as Wallace Furman
Michael Learned as Governor Andrea Stannard
J. T. Walsh as Jerome Cade
Matt Salinger as Phillip Aarons
Critical reception
In his extremely negative review of Power in The New York Times, Vincent Canby described the film as "a well-meaning, witless, insufferably smug movie that... suffers from the total lack of a comic imagination." However, in his much more favorable review of Power in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert observed, "It's smart, it's knowledgeable, sometimes it's funny, occasionally it is very touching, and I learned something from it... The movie builds up considerable momentum during its first hour. There's a sense of excitement, of identification with this man who is being driven by his own energy, ambition and cynicism... During the second half of the movie, however, a growing disappointment sets in. Power is too episodic. It doesn't really declare itself to be about any particular story, any single clear-cut issue... the movie itself seems to sense that it's going nowhere. The climax is a pointless, frustrating montage of images. It's a good montage, but it belongs somewhere in the middle of the movie; it states the problem, but not the solution or even the lack of a solution. The movie seems to be asking us to walk out of the theater shaking our heads in disillusionment, but I was more puzzled than disillusioned." On Rotten Tomatoes, it served a "rotten" 50% score. Metacritic also scored 50%, this time, indicating "mixed or average reviews".
