It stars a lot of heavy hitters from the era, including Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Laura Linney, Ed Harris, Scott Glenn and Dennis Haysbert.
The story is great, but it's surprisingly inefficient in the micro-edits.
This is one of the more technical bits of criticism I might level against a film, but this film takes way too long to get to the point within scenes.
As an example, there's a bit where two guys are prepping to assassinate Eastwood's character in a series of parallel, intercut edits. They each get situated. They open their respective cases. Take out parts. Assemble the guns. Pull out one bullet. Stare at the bullet (seriously). Sloooowly put the bullet into the chamber, and slide the bolt forward.
The whole thing probably takes 2 minutes of screen time, all to just show two guys with rifles loading a round and getting ready to shoot a guy.
The whole movie is kinda like this. Stuff that should take 30 seconds takes a minute. Stuff that should take a minute takes 2-3. Stuff that should be covered in a 6 or 7 minute scene takes 10-15 minutes.
But I must stress that this is all happening withing the micro-edits (cuts within a scene), not the macro-editing (scene-to-scene structure). In other words, there aren't a bunch of pointless scenes or parts of the movie that don't advance the story. We needed to see these guys setting up to assassinate Eastwood. But every scene just drags, and it all adds up.
In the end, we have a theoretically exciting thriller that is about 30 minutes too long.