Chasing Liberty Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)January 9th, 2004
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The best thing you could say about a movie like Chasing Liberty is that it could have been worse. While that's not much of a compliment, it's as close as you'll get for films released in the traditional Dumping Ground period of January and February. Liberty, essentially a bad update of Roman Holiday, is saved from being yet another throwaway flick about a teen vixen trekking across the Atlantic in order to find herself by the performance of budding superstar Mandy Moore, who has already forged a clear distinction between herself and half-talents like Hilary Duff and Britney Spears both musically and on the screen.
Moore plays Anna Foster, the only child of second-term US president James Foster (Mark Harmon). Anna is a hot-as-a pistol 18-year-old who can't keep her clothes on, but hasn't yet made it to third base. This, presumably, is because of the constant surveillance of the Secret Service, who ruin dates with Anna's potential suitors in comical vignettes like the one we see in Liberty's opening scene. She may as well be wearing a chastity belt.
During a summer trip to Europe, Anna plans to escape the eye of her agents (Annabella Sciorra and Jeremy Piven - this is the kind of role he gets when buddy John Cusack isn't the star) by dashing off with the daughter of a French politician. But the SS, whose secret codename for Anna explains the film's title, know all about it and assign one of their finest young British agents (!) to befriend Anna and accompany her on the wacky European adventure that will, hopefully, serve as an oat-sowing type of departure to help the curvy kid buckle down once she starts college in the fall.
You see where this is going, don't you? Anna falls for Agent Ben Calder (Matthew Goode) without knowing he's an agent. Ben slowly realizes he has more than just Treasury Department feelings for Anna. Music swells and we all go home, right? If only things were that simple. Liberty has an ending that just doesn't want to end (no doubt inspired by the oodles of cash The Return of the King is raking in by doing the same stupid thing). Maybe it would have been more palatable if I hadn't had to sit through 15 minutes of trailers for a nonstop parade of other dumb vehicles for "tweenie" stars before I saw Liberty. But I doubt it.
Debut screenwriters Derek Guiley and David Schneiderman don't give director Andy Cadiff much to work with, but even if they had, nobody would expect him to do a lot with it. Cadiff, strictly a television sitcom director as of late, is the force behind some of the small screen's most diabolically unfunny shows of the last half-decade (It's All Relative, According to Jim, My Wife and Kids, etc.). Liberty could have taken a darker, more sinister route (a la the adventures of the First Daughter from The West Wing), but that would have alienated the film's core demographic (a/k/a Generation Lip Gloss). Still, even though I could have done without what might be the most offensive Italian stereotypes I have ever seen, Liberty really made me appreciate the clamp the White House has applied to the lives of the Bush twins. They're about as easy to find lately as Osama Bin Laden.
1:51 - PG-13 for sexual content and brief nudity
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