A major flare-up of liberal paranoia, from a director chronically afflicted by it. It is only because of him and his prior attacks -- Costa-Gavras, by name, and Z, State Of Siege, Special Section, Missing -- that we can be sure this movie is Serious. Otherwise we might make the terrible mistake of throwing it in with the unmemorable Burt Reynolds potboiler, Malone. That one, too, concerned itself with a computer-connected network of right-wing survivalists -- and did so without any pretensions of ripping up the floorboards of American society and forcing us to look at our dirty little secrets, but rather did so with no other thought than to exploit a commonplace. The shock value of Betrayed, in any event, is not lessened simply because something like Malone got there first, nor because Betrayed itself is something like Malone, but because the very strategy of extrapolation and exaggeration (as science fictionists, for instance, understand well) inherently makes hard truths easier to swallow and transforms the thuddingly concrete into the airily abstract. Racism, to descend now to specifics, is an American scandal a long ways short of white supremacism and its implementation through nocturnal "coon hunts" and Manchurian Candidate-type political assassinations. And although it is at all times dramatically and logically valid to follow a vein of reality to its furthermost and fantasticalmost extreme, the potential drawback of this procedure, and in this case the definite effect of it, is a tendency to reassure the viewer in his own saneness rather than to shake him out of it. Debra Winger, Tom Berenger, John Heard. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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