---

After a communication snafu between him and his U.S. Army security unit indirectly leaves multiple people dead, Master Sgt. Johnny Gallagher (Gene Hackman) is demoted to someone in his standing’s equivalent to grunt work. A little into The Package (1989), a sturdy conspiracy thriller, he’s tasked with escorting disgraced sergeant Walter Henke (Tommy Lee Jones) from West Berlin to the U.S. for a court martial. At first the assignment doesn’t seem so bad. Walter, with a Seussian smile, is good-humored enough, and doesn’t try anything funny to slip from Johnny’s watchful eye. But then the pair gets to the Dulles International Airport, where Johnny is knocked out in the bathroom by a team of undercover agents working for lord knows who. Walter flees. When Johnny pays a visit to Walter’s wife in Arlington for answers, he has a couple of realizations: that this Walter is an imposter (Jones couldn’t look any more different than that young guy in all those couples portraits), and that that earlier communication snafu was maybe not his fault at all but possibly part of a larger setup whose nuts and bolts haven’t quite yet revealed themselves. 

With assistance from his ex-wife Eileen (Joanna Cassidy), who’s currently sitting in a higher-ranked military position, Johnny uncovers what looks to be an assassination plot whose inner-workings are better experienced by the viewer without any prior knowledge. (One of the easy pleasures of The Package is that it’s a political thriller whose maze is actually straightforwardly navigable once you’ve settled in — John Bishop’s screenplay doesn’t make followability and complexity mutually exclusive.) It initially seems like it’ll be an elementary cat-and-mouse chase, with Walter — if that is his real name — usually the feline of the two. (He’s great with disguises.) But the clearer his intentions, and the intentions of those above him, get, the more classically conspiratorial the movie becomes. 

Everything culminates in a taut, ideally-lengthed climax that gives us what we’d want from a movie like this without belaboring the point or falling into a good-guys-win trap a film this cynical about governmental truthfulness would be wrong to have. It also makes good use of its principal Chicago setting (a place director Andrew Davis loves revisiting in his movies). By the finale, Davis has given you such a good feel for this environment that when things get particularly intense you have a strong sense of the advantages and limitations of this radius’ layout. 

The Package is all smart and watchable without being transcendent. Hackman’s weathered everyman-hero routine is in fine form, and his chemistry with the game Cassidy is solid. It moves nicely to and from spikiness and mutual ease; they’re believably cosplaying as an amicably split-up couple. And Dennis Franz makes the most of a supporting part that mostly just requires he do what he’s most recognized for: be a tough good guy whose outward appearance of hardness is mostly a front. My only real quibbles with the movie are more based in personal preference than they are real faults of the film. I couldn’t help but be a little bit annoyed with a movie that makes such good use of Jones — in a delightful, rare-for-him comic form, at least in the beginning — early on only to make him increasingly unseen as the film continues, and also slot force-of-nature Pam Grier into a thankless, practically anonymous role. Just when you think the movie will give her something interesting to do, she’s rendered disposable. The Package itself is pretty disposable, too, but it’s effective for what it is.