14 Days of Paranoia #4: Conspiracy (dir by Adam Marcus)

2008’s Conspiracy opens in Iraq.

A group of American soldiers are searching for militants. Amongst them is the grim-faced William “Spooky” MacPherson (Val Kilmer). When an adorable little girl with a teddy bear approaches the soldiers, MacPherson barely notices. His mind is on adult threats. But when the girl reveals that she has a bomb in her backpack, the majority of the soldiers are blown up with her. MacPherson survives, though he loses a leg and ends up with such severe PTSD that he can no longer carry a gun or even make a fist. Helping him recover from his wounds is his best friend and fellow soldier, Miguel (Greg Serano).

A year or so later, MacPherson is back home. He lives in a run-down apartment in New York and spends most of his time with a naked woman who speaks Russian. (Whether she was meant to be his girlfriend or just someone he hired is unclear.) Miguel continually calls him up and asks him to come down to New Mexico and work on his ranch. MacPherson refuses at first. He wants to remain isolated from the world. But when his flashbacks of the explosion become too intense, MacPherson finally decides to accept Miguel’s offer. MacPherson pawns a gun so that he’ll have enough money to get a bus ticket. And then, he heads for New Mexico.

The only problem is that, once MacPherson arrives in New Mexico, Miguel is nowhere to be seen. Walking through a town that appears to have recently been constructed, MacPherson meets a lot of people who insist that they’ve never heard of Miguel and that there is no ranch at the address that Miguel gave MacPherson. The police carefully watch MacPherson as he makes his way from business to business, searching for his friend. No one in town is friendly. No one seems to want MacPherson around. Eventually, MacPherson is approached by Rhodes (Gary Cole), the businessman who is building the town and who apparently controls everything that happens within the town limits. Rhodes is friendly. Rhodes says that MacPherson, with his white skin and blonde hair, is exactly the type of person that he likes to see in his town. Can you tell where this is going?

You probably already guessed that Rhodes is an evil businessman who is involved in human trafficking and who smuggles Mexicans across the border to work for his company before then sending back to their home country with next to no money. You’ve also probably figured out that Miguel was killed by the corrupt police force. If you haven’t figured that out, you’ve never seen a movie before. MacPherson teams up with the only kind person in town, Joanna (Jennifer Esposito), and they try to stop Rhodes’s operation. The entire movie seems to be building up to a scene where MacPherson and Joanna take on the whole town but instead, somewhat anticlimactically, everyone just stands around and watches Rhodes battle MacPherson. Conspiracy promises a lot but it doesn’t really deliver.

This was one of Val Kilmer’s first straight-to-video roles and he gives a rather detached performance, which is a shame because an actor of Kilmer’s talent could have really done something with this role if he had been in the mood to do so. But I don’t blame Kilmer for not seeming to be that invested in Conspiracy. It’s not a very interesting film. Even the usually dependable Gary Cole just seems to be going through the motions. The film’s attempt to comment on the pressing political issues of 2008 — illegal immigration, the war in Iraq, the burst of the housing bubble, the recession — only serve to reinforce how shallow and heavy-handed the film actually is. Watching Conspiracy in 2025, the most interesting about it is that the issues it deals with are the issues that, 17 years later, Americans are still dealing with.

With its portrayal of an isolated town and a scarred war veteran looking for a missing friend, Conspiracy has a lot in common with the classic 1955 film, Bad Day At Black Rock. Now, that’s a film that is definitely worth seeing!

Previous entries in 2025’s 14 Days Of Paranoia: