To me, this movie is perfection.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

"Conspiracy" has Val Kilmer playing an traumatized Marine who searches for his best friend, another Marine, who disappeared in a small town where no one seems to know about him and are not warm in terms of welcoming people who are not from there. The local residents of this city à-la Old West style built by a powerful businessman (Gary Cole) will do anything to bother Kilmer and his obstinate search.An more experienced viewer will have one title popping on his head while watching this: "Bad Day at Black Rock". Yes, "Conspiracy" amazingly resembles the 1955 film directed by John Sturges starring Spencer Tracy as the mysterious one armed man who defeats a whole town just to deliver an medal to an soldier friend of his. Both stories deal with small towners prejudices against foreigners; both stories have an main character who is handicapped in a way and somehow this isn't an adversity at all; and both plots take place in desert areas. What makes the older film better than the new one (this isn't a remake however) is the originality and the tension presented there, the mystery was more gripping. What is presented in this recent project is an action film with lots of shootings, bullets and knives flying, a simplistic story made to please an large audience who enjoys that kind of movie. Nonetheless, it's a decent and enjoyable action film, the required elements for this genre are all present here, Kilmer is quite good as the Marine who needs to put his demons behind him, after an traumatic event that he testified during the war in Iraq, rebuilding himself in order to find out what happened to his friend. Since most viewers really dislike old films, this is a nice substitute to Sturges film. But that one was an complete classic compared to this. 7/10

If you've seen Bad Day at Black Rock you've seen the better version of this.A crippled veteran (Tracy a missing hand/Kilmer a missing leg) arrives in a closely knit and secretive older west style town with something to hide asking about a veteran Hispanic Hero (in Black Rock it was a Japanese who had a war hero son). In both the person searched for had been murdered. Both town's were isolated and off the main route.One chief bad guy and a couple of henchmen and a whole town full of people looking away, staying uninvolved.Val Kilmer - Spencer Tracy; Gary Cole - Robert Ryan; Jennifer Esposito - Ann Francis; Jay Jablonski - Dean Jagger; The wildflower at the grave; The empty/full hotel and reluctant clerk; the unavailable taxicab or rental car; Christopher Gehrman - Ernest Borgnine; Scott Burkett or David Frye (take your pick) - Lee Marvin; Harassment at lunchtime in diner ending in a man through screen door Bowl of Chili - Bowl of Chili; Milk - KetchupToo many coincidences to not accept that this borrowed heavily from Bad Day At Black Rock and updated it. I'm not saying it's plagiarism, but someone surely saw and liked Bad Day and later took pen in hand and the gray matter replayed an impression left into a new story; honest mistake.The only things missing were the jeep/car chase, Walter Brennan's role, the Molotov cocktail, and the telegrapher (which wouldn't be needed because of the era). The Conspiracy added more bad guys and didn't have a train, but they did have a carpool.Another coincidence: Kilmer has made an extraordinary amount of movies in New Mexico; he must like it there, or perhaps even lives there??Some of this town looked a lot like the Silverado set, I think I saw the saloon where Costner backed out and drew and fired at 90 degree angles at bad guys.

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!

This movie sucked. I mean... wow. I surely didn't expect a masterpiece. But the actual level of suckitude left me speechless and almost breathless, as if my body was trying to rescue itself into sweet unconsciousness. It reminded me, and heavily at that, of Steven Seagal. But not the Seagal of "Under Siege" or "On Deadly Ground", who we all came to love. No, I mean the Steven Seagal who brought us straight-to-video suckfests like "Black Dawn".Val Kilmer, like Seagal, is just a blimp, floating through the foggy remains of a story, while it rains wooden puppets. Who of course are the other actors in my weird little analogy.Every little thing in this movie is bad and sucks in ways where there are no more words to articulate a warning. So let me just say this: DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE! Thank you for your attention.