Roy Hart
If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.
Bill357
I am so glad that I rented Conspiracy before buying it!It was completely surprising to find out exactly how much Val Kilmer was emotionally invested in this movie! Judging by his bloated appearance and sleepwalking performance, I assumed he was only in it for the money and was bored or that he was deliberately trying to sabotage a film he felt was beneath him!In all four of the Val Kilmer movies I've seen lately (Conspiracy, Moscow Zero, Felon, and Dead Man's Bounty where he plays a corpse) he appears to be clinically depressed! I don't know what Val needs more, Weight Watchers or Lithium!Of the whole wooden cast only Gary Cole seems to be having any fun.Everything they say about the silly leftist slant of Conspiracy is true. I don't know any left-wingers that even watch any straight-to-video action movies. The only reason I can even conceive of this being made is as a Trojan Horse to get into living rooms and spit in the face of the people whom the filmmakers disagree.This is one big political screed that should be ignored as much as possible.
dredyoung
Another of America's Dirty Little Corporate Secrets I watched a movie the other night called "Conspiracy" (2008 staring Val Kilmer). It had received somewhat poor reviews. This was justified for a professional movie critic who bases their critique on traditional, Hollywood, Oscar-like standards. However, I saw it as a great 'message movie'. I knew a little about the controversy over Mexican immigrant legislation, a little about the Maquiladores, as well as a little about the worldwide exploitation of underdeveloped countries by US corporations, so I immediately became engrossed in the movie. This movie is a valid dramatization of what American corporations have been doing for many decades now. In the movie, Halliburton and Brown and Root and other such companies are all accurately portrayed by their compression into the movie's one 'fictitious' corporation, Halicorp. The movie also accurately represents the true situation with respect to Mexican 'illegals'. Americans have been employing them to do our dirty, hard work while keeping the death scythe of deportation or arrest over their heads to keep them working for slave wages which they need to save their families in Mexico from starvation. A conveniently opportunistic system has been devised whereby US corporations undermine Mexican corporations and make it impossible for Mexicans to earn a living in Mexico. Consequently, Mexican laborers have to flee to the US and take below subsistence wages. The only other alternative for them has been the Maquiladoras. In the beginning, the Maquiladoras were supposed to help the Mexican cities along the border economically but this turned into a nightmare as the US corporations exploited, virtually raped, the cities and their people who had come in the millions to live along the US-Mexican border and make a decent living. Eventually, these corporations moved on to cheaper slave labor in underdeveloped countries that were even worse off. Those border towns turned into impoverished garbage heaps. Those Mexican workers, therefore, had no choice but to swim across the border river or the climb border fences to find slave-wage work in the US. Those who take the time to inquire and those with eyes and ears to see and to hear with their hearts know, understand, and grieve for these Mexican Maquiladores workers and Mexican immigrant workers and their families who are caught in the tragic trap laid for them by the US corporations. There are those who know much of this and are happy to benefit from such dastardly exploitation. Yet, there are some caring few who create sanctuary churches and cities to care for desperate 'illegals' and their shattered families and often even sequester them from local 'de jure' police who are really serving as 'de facto' henchmen, a kind of recrudescent form of the KKK, for local businesses. On the other hand, there are these unconscionably insensitive, narcissistic, obsessively acquisitive employers who find all sorts of convenient ways to rationalize and blithely transform the plight of their Mexican illegal slave workers so as to make it seem like they are actually providing them with a great blessing, in fact, saving them. The white, well-to-do, ordinary American employers also rationalize this villainous behavior by seeing themselves as superior, a kind of unofficial master race, and their non-white slave workers as somewhat like mongrel dogs that must be kept from citizenship in order to prevent a pollution of our pure genes and true American heritage. The movie drives home a final thrust by revealing the xenophobic bigotry of the Halicorp types like Rhodes, the local head of Halicorp, when Rhodes, attacks and demeans retired Special Ops Marine William, whom he thinks he has beaten, for being half American Indian and half Anglo American. War-hero McPherson is the stranger-newly-come-to-town who successfully defends the town, New Lago, and its 'illegal alien' workers against Rhodes and his puppet Sheriff, deputies, and other complicit locals who were acting as Rhodes' thugs out of fear for their lives,. In the end, the people of New Lago, 'emblematic of the vast majority of ordinary people', finally rise up and turn against Rhodes, "emblematic of corporate American CEOs", demonstrating that, after all is said and done, America is a land of non-xenophobic, non-bigoted, non-exclusionist, multi-colored, multi-racial immigrants. On the other hand, however, in America, we know there are a great many Americans who simply choose to look the other way and let this corrupt and calamitous situation with our decent immigrant workers putrefy. Many are aware that this same type of exploitation by American Corporations is taking place in underdeveloped countries all over the globe and do nothing. Finally, there are the perpetrators who are running these US-legitimized criminal operations and hosts of right-wing political and media lackeys who are aligned with them. For these criminal corporations, Halicorp is the perfect, 'grotesques' symbol!
Will Von Wizzlepig
Film is entertainment, to be sure, but film is also art.In the entertainment category, this movie is essentially interchangeable with any random episode of "the Dukes of Hazzard" or "the A-Team". That is, campy garbage.In the art category, it's somewhere between soul-less, mass-produced garbage (see also, comics in the paper which ran their course years ago but which continue on anyway) and something your kid made which you are forced to display on the refrigerator. That is, hollow, of low-quality, and unimpressive.Sad for Val Kilmer, who was so very recently awesome in "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang". I guess it's no surprise- IMDb shows he worked on nine different projects in 2008. Perhaps one of his other projects will make up for it.I give the movie a 3 merely for its technical merit- the prize you get for showing up, so to speak- and the fact that the movie hints at a conspiracy concerning the USA and war {gasp!}.
lschwarz90
I was very curious about this movie, because it contained two names: val kilmer and jennifer esposito. but after the first 20minutes i was very sad: this movie is a waste of time. really. now if u wonder why i watched it until the end (cause i did), that has only one reason: jennifer esposito. she is a way more better actress than val kilmer ever be. his acting is awful, and he can't carry the movie. this can only be done by jennifer esposito, who plays kilmers love interest...sadly she has not so many scenes. so i only give this movie 3 out of 10, which is the best i can do.. it's a waste of time, and it's boring, sometimes even ridiculous.
