Arnold Should Consider Political Thrillers!
Arnie’s Life Can Imitate The Arts!
Reported By: ABking
Friday, March 10, 2006

Now that Arnold has the experience of governorship forever, he can incorporate that with a couple of future films. Arnie has never made political popcorn films and maybe the time is right to tackle a couple of them into box-office gold.

Arnie has never played the president of the United States or a burned out secret service agent in any of his past films, and these two roles could easily play to his strengths. Schwarzenegger is the right age for these roles and has the strong presence to carry them. Two perfect examples of these genres are DAVE and IN THE LINE OF FIRE.

Lets start with the 1993 Ivan Rittman political comedy hit DAVE starring Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver and Frank Langella, who was the bad guy in Arnold's Ivan Reitman comedy flop JUNIOR. In DAVE, Bill Mitchell (Kline) is the philandering and distant President of the United States. Dave Kovic (also played by Kline) is a sweet-natured and caring Temp Agency operator, who by a staggering coincidence looks exactly like the President. As such, when Mitchell wants to escape an official luncheon, the Secret Service hires Dave to stand in for him. Unfortunately, Mitchell suffers a severe stroke whilst having sex with one of his aides, and Dave finds himself stuck in the role indefinitely. The corrupt and manipulative Chief of Staff Bob Alexander (Langella) plans to use Dave to elevate himself to the White House - but unfortunately, he doesn't count on Dave enjoying himself in office, using his luck to make the country a better place, and falling in love with the beautiful First Lady (Weaver).

This kind of comedy would work very well for Arnie. Schwarzenegger would make a great fictional president making political speeches like the awesome one he gave at the Republican convention in 2005. If directed by the right filmmaker (Ivan Reitman) maybe Arnie could be nominated for an Oscar in this role. I truly believe that Schwarzenegger has the acting chops to pull off an Oscar nomination. If you go watch DAVE and play the scene where Kevin Kline delivers the big speech at the end, picture Arnold doing it! It was once reported that Maria Shriver bought the rights to a script that featured a president character, so could Arnold do that film in the future? Hmmm.... By the way, Arnold made a very brief cameo in DAVE for his good director friend Reitman playing himself.

The next role Arnie would kick serious ass in is as a burnt out secret service agent. For the best example of this, I'll reference Arnold's great filmmaker pal Clint Eastwood's political drama thriller IN THE LINE OF FIRE. The film directed by Wolfgang Petersen (someone Arnie wanted to work with) came out in the summer of 1993 to fantastic reviews and quickly became Eastwood's biggest box-office smash grossing 102 million domestic, 74 million foreign and a super 176 million worldwide. Clint was even older in that film in 1993 than Arnie is now. Eastwood even threw in some romance and had sex appeal with Rene Russo. IN THE LINE OF FIRE did wonders for Clint's successful career, and so could a similar role for Arnold.

The action thriller had a great tagline: An assassin on the loose. A president in danger. Only one man stands between them...the plot goes like this...Veteran Secret Service agent Frank Horrigan (Eastwood) is a man haunted by his failure to save President Kennedy while serving protection detail in Dallas. He currently does mostly undercover work. He goes to check on a report about a person calling himself "Booth" (John Malkovich) who is threatening the life of the current President. When he goes to the man's apartment, he finds clippings and photos of various assassinations throughout history. When he does a background check, he discovers that the man's identity is false. So he goes back to the apartment to get him, but when he goes in there, he finds the apartment cleaned out except for a photo of him when he was in Dallas, November 1963, protecting Kennedy. Later he gets a phone call from the man and tells him that he plans to kill the President and is daring Frank to stop him. When Frank reports to his superiors, he finds that there are some people like the agent in charge of protecting the President and the Chief of Staff, who think that Frank is letting his failure to protect Kennedy cloud his judgment. This forces Horrigan to come back to protection detail to confront the ghosts from his past. But as Frank chases him down, he discovers that he is not dealing with a nut but with a well organized individual.