CHUCK'S ROUNDHOUSE: The President's Man: A Line in the Sand (2002)

Finding ratings information for obscure television movies from twenty-four years ago is not always easily done. However, I can deduce a few things about the reception “The President's Man” got from audiences in 2000. It drew enough eyeballs for CBS to move forward with the project but not so many that a series order was immediately given. Instead, the greenlight was received for essentially a second pilot. This is typically what happens when a network sees something promising in a show but agrees that some bugs need to be ironed out. It doesn't always happen in public – and then archived forever via home video – as was the case here. “The President's Man: A Line in the Sand” would feature a lighter tone than the first and would recast the younger leading man opposite Chuck Norris. Another big difference was a reflection of how the world had changed between 2000 and January of 2002, when “A Line in the Sand” aired. This is the film that would bring the old school action style of Chuck Norris into the strange, strange era of post-9/11 jingoism. 

It would seem about three years have passed since the events of the first "President's Man" film. Deke Slater is now fully established as the American president's personal man of action, with Joshua McCord and his daughter Que acting as assistants. The U.S.A. is currently under threat by Fadhal Rashid, the head of a militant Islamic extremist faction. Rashid's followers have obtained a small nuclear bomb and successfully smuggled it into the United States, with plans to detonate it in a large city. Slater is air-dropped into the Middle East, where he blasts into Rashid's compound and captures the terrorist leader. However, Rashid's followers, most prominently his son Abir, remain at large and await a coded message from their leader. The plan becomes to sneak the dirty bomb into Dallas before setting it off. Slater and McCord leap into action to find the nuke, disarm it, and make the dastardly terrorists pay. 

If the above plot synopsis didn't indicate as much, "A Line in the Sand" is a distinctly different brand of propaganda from the first "The President's Man" film. The original had the good guys up against South American drug runners and nebulous "terrorists" of uncertain allegiance, connected to elderly enemies left over from the Cold War. Pretty old hat by 2000. The sequel, meanwhile, positions a seemingly Sunni Islamic jihadist as the mastermind behind a plot to kill countless Americans. Al-Qaeda and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center are mentioned by name. The words "weapons of mass destruction" are spoken. Rashid is described as Pakistani like Ramzi Yousef, the organizer of the aforementioned attack. However, his tendency to issue video recorded statements from his secret hiding place and his connections to Saudi Arabia also makes him a clear Osama bin Ladin parallel, already a notorious figure by the late nineties. What is not mentioned is 9/11. IMDb's frequently inaccurate information lists "A Line in the Sand's" filming date as May of 2001. If that is correct is true, any relation to the events that would happen later that year were unintentional. (Assuming you don't believe in certain conspiracy theories.) 

However, the film still operates totally in-line with American attitudes after the towers fell. The bad guys are all brown religious extremists who hate the U.S.A. and everyone who lives there as a course of belief. We are the infidels that should be scourged with holy fire. Certainly no mention is made of how the foreign policy of the U.S. and our allies might have radicalized any persons, real or fictional, against us. There are two very weird scenes in "The President's Man II." The first sees McCord – now upgraded to a college professor on all foreign cultures, I guess, not just the Japanese – argue against a student who believes we should indiscriminately nuke all of the Middle East. Chuck's character clarifies that violent terrorists make up a tiny percentage of all Muslims worldwide. That we should not correlate an entire faith with the actions of a few extremists. Later, an American Muslim fires back at Rashid, saying that his bloody schemes are actually in defiance of Muhammad's teachings and that Islam is a religion of peace. These moments stand in stark contrast to the multiple scenes of our white heroes kicking and gunning down brown baddies in turbans and robes. 

These scenes remind me of a speech George W. Bush made in the aftermath of 9/11, denouncing anti-Islamic prejudice here and abroad. Words he presumably spoke before approving military actions in Afghanistan that contributed to the estimated 46,319 civilians killed during the resulting twenty year war. In other words, cinematic moments such as these and their real life parallels read as deeply insincere. "A Line in the Sand" is a film about a bad-ass American being dropped into the Middle East and single-handedly capturing a terrorist leader. Its back half features scenes of red-blooded patriots extra-judicially kicking the asses of stereotypical Middle Eastern terrorists. These are very weird contexts in which to place pleas that your nearest masque has nothing to do with Al-Qaeda. This is aggravated propaganda meant to inflame American hearts and minds against our nebulous enemies, that would soon be the central targets of the war on terror that the U.S. enacted shortly after this movie was filmed. 

I must also say that "The President's Man: A Line in the Sand" is not especially good propaganda.  In the first film, Dylan Neal played Deke Slater as a hot-headed, standoffish jerk who was only beginning to defrost. The character is recast with Judson Mills in this sequel. This was supposedly because of scheduling conflicts. However, Mills plays Slater in such a wildly different manner from Neal that it might as well be a different character, suggesting that this was a deliberate change. Mills' take on the guy is largely jovial, often making sarcastic observations. I would not say this is an improvement, as Mills is actually more wooden and stiff in his acting than Neal was. He's a bright-eyed hunk of meat with a strong chin but delivers all his dialogue like a surprised baby. There's little charisma or screen presence. I did not find myself invested in the character or enchanted by Mills' acting, making it hard to care too much about any of the shit that happens here. 

Judson Mills' appearance here follows a starring role in the last two seasons of “Walker, Texas Ranger.” One assumes that his character was introduced on that show to do the kind of action hero stunts that Chuck Norris was aging out of. That is obviously the case here too. Norris has surprisingly little to do in the first half of “A Line in the Sand.” He spends a lot of the movie standing behind a desk, looking at a screen, and speaking into a com-link. Mills, meanwhile, is doing all the running, leaping, kicking, and punching. I figured this would be the state of affairs throughout all of “A Line in the Sand,” the then-61 year old Chuck Norris having retired to mentor roles. However, the last act of the sequel sees Joshua McCord surprisingly joining the action. This got my hopes up that we might actually see Chuck Norris do some Chuck Norris shit in this motion picture. Unfortunately, “The President's Man II” was made during the era when no attempt at all was being made to disguise that its action star was an old, old man now. The film sees Norris' character doing shit like triple back flips through the air or leaping several feet onto a pipe without any issue. The most action Norris himself has is defusing a bomb, a protracted sequence if I've ever seen one. 

In fact, the action scenes in “A Line in the Sand” are some really silly business. When Slater is fighting off bad guys, his favorite move is a somersault kick that seems to violate the law of gravity to me. During the aforementioned triple back flip, Chuck's character is also accurately firing a gun. The film gets goofier as it goes on, the finale featuring the heroes delivering superhuman blows that launch their opponents across the room. All I can figure is this was some half-ass attempt to catch up with the exaggerated action theatrics of “The Matrix” and the wave of films it inspired. In general, the film is infected with a fatal cheesiness that outstrips the original. There's a random jet pack sequence. Multiple training montages or sparring sessions are scored to hilariously bad rap songs. While some camp value can be derived from ridiculous moments, the impression the film leaves a viewer with is that the project's vision far outstripped its available resources. 

Truthfully, most of “The President's Man II: A Line in the Sand” is dull. The action scenes are repetitive and rare. Far more of the film is devoted to people standing around and talking about shit. Its obviously Islamophobic content is interesting from an anthropological perspective, as a relic of a time that we have hopefully moved past, but is just reheated bullshit in execution. While I can imagine a perspective “President's Man” series further building off the national mood of blind jingoism and paranoia that would follow, not even that was enough to get the public interested in this one. The film would be the end of this particular franchise. More dire than the already pretty lame original, this film represents the point where it dawned on me that watching all of Chuck Norris movies might have been a mistake. [4/10]

[THE CHUCK OF NORRIS: 2 outta 5]
[X] Facial Hair
[X] Jumps or Kicks Through a Window or Wall
[] Performs Spin Kick or Spin Punch to Enemy's Face
[] Shows Off His Hairy Chest
[] Sports Some Cowboy Getup