In ““Mad City,’’ Costa Gavras takes aim at that bullet-riddled target the media. Max Brackett (Dustin Hoffman), a former hotshot national TV reporter who had an on-camera fight with his anchor, has been banished to a local California station. Max sees his way out of the hinterland when a schoolkids’ outing at the local museum turns into a hostage situation. A laid-off guard, Sam Baily (John Travolta), turns up with a rifle and dynamite. When he accidentally wounds a guard, the local media swarm to the scene. But the slick Max takes control, coaching the dimwitted Baily and wangling exclusive access from the cops. His former anchor, Kevin Hollander (Alan Alda), shows up and pulls rank, offering Max a network job if he moves to the background.
The result is tragic, fueled by media lust for a mini-Waco. TV execs adjust their coverage to the shifting polls on sympathy for Sam, the $8-an-hour guy with a family to support. Camera crews force their way everywhere. Interviews are inane, some edited to falsify context. Larry King does his classic remote like the Wizard of Disaster. Watching ““Mad City’’ is like watching a thousand familiar TV stories. Such familiarity kills impact. The genius of Oliver Stone, however controversial, in movies like ““Natural Born Killers,’’ has been to leap beyond reality, taking it to such a pitch of mad surrealism that he touches the profound pathology of a media-driven culture. And long before Stone, Billy Wilder’s 1951 ““The Big Carnival’’ (which is the source for Tom Matthews’s ““Mad City’’ screenplay) was a Swiftian take on a cynical reporter milking a small-town disaster to further his career.
Hoffman’s Max is a corporate dilution of the Kirk Douglas character in ““The Big Carnival.’’ Travolta is more interesting. He’s done a De Niro, gaining weight so that his potbelly and mutton-chopped jowls seem like the very protoplasm of the loser. Calming his kid hostages with Indian stories and junk food, Travolta’s Sam focuses the residue of Costa Gavras’s once raging social concern. But ““Mad City’’ is not mad enough.
