IN LIKE CLINT

By RICHARD CORLISS

The film's poster is boldly simple: a close-up of Clint staring both out of and into the darkness, with a visage as stark and stony as if it were a fifth face on Mount Rushmore. The image is fully aware of its iconic import, of the strength and frailty of stardom in late middle age. So is Absolute Power, the movie that fleshes out this hunk of granite. Many of its leading actors were born before the Rushmore carvings were completed in 1941. Eastwood, directing himself as a cat burglar on his eighth or ninth life, is 66, as is Gene Hackman, who plays a sexually reckless U.S. President. E.G. Marshall, in the role of the President's adviser, is 86 and counting. The plot is a doomsday version of Bill Clinton's Paula Jones problem, but the theme is impending mortality--settling scores before time's up.

Screenwriter William Goldman, 65, working from the David Balducci novel, asks you to believe that the burglar has hidden behind a two-way mirror in a room where the President is having nasty sex with his adviser's young wife--and that our larcenous hero does nothing to stop her murder. This old-style thriller sometimes creaks in its joints as it adds an amoral aide (Judy Davis), a canny cop (Ed Harris) and a Secret Service agent (Scott Glenn) as weary as the one Clint played in In the Line of Fire. But Eastwood is less interested in political corruption than in filial care; the warming, nicely played relationship of the burglar and his lawyer daughter (Laura Linney) is the source of the film's absolute power. It's a sweet pleasure to see a fatherly smile crack open that Rushmore face.

--By Richard Corliss