“You’re looking for a man with no nose! Not me!” Mel Gibson does crazy well. And thanks to director Richard Donner, Conspiracy Theory has plenty of action and suspense to flesh out the brilliantly twisted story, the eccentric characters and the unpredictable series of increasingly more abstract events. It’s a highly charged thriller with entertaining mystery and frequent, dark humor.

Jerry Fletcher (Mel Gibson) is not too different from Lethal Weapon’s Detective Riggs as far as his reasoning is concerned – he’s a largely loony New York taxi driver with an opinion on every government plot, paranoid suspicions about everyone, and a master of tons of worthless trivia. No coincidence is without a conspiracy. The Grateful Dead are all spies. Oliver Stone is a disinformation junkie for the United States. NASA is trying to kill the president. “They” and “them” are behind it all. Jerry lives in a tiny storage compartment with four locks on his door and a padlock on his refrigerator. His home is booby-trapped from all sides and his main hobby consists of writing up and printing a Conspiracy Theory newsletter which he distributes through the mail (with only 5 subscribers). The irrational man also has an unexplainably weird obsession with buying copies of the book The Catcher in the Rye (“You must think I’m crazy, huh?”).

He’s plagued with random, bad flashbacks, so to calm himself down he spies on Alice Sutton (Julia Roberts) as she exercises in her apartment. She works for the Justice Department and investigates the mysterious death of her father in her spare time. When Jerry is abducted, tied to a wheelchair and tortured with “gravy for the brain” injections and seizure-inducing lights, he narrowly escapes, and returns to Alice for help – but winds up being arrested.  Now he’s a fugitive who has to elude the police, teams of secret agents and an incomparably evil man named Dr. Jonas (Patrick Stewart), a twisted psychiatrist affiliated with an unknown, super-secret government agency.

Stewart channels a Marathon Man interrogation mindset (“Who else knows!” he demands), the music by Carter Burwell is appropriately chilling, and Gibson and Roberts’ chemistry isn’t half bad - but ol’ Mel is the highlight with his crazy ramblings, wild-eyed expressions, spontaneous, destructive decisions and corny jokes. It’s a thrill-ride escape adventure full of fun, excitement and unpredictability.  If you can’t figure out where the film is going within the first hour or so, Conspiracy Theory is working its magic.

- Mike Massie

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