Mad City is a 1997 thriller directed by Costa-Gavras and starring Dustin Hoffman, John Travolta, Mia Kirshner, Alan Alda, Ted Levine, and Robert Prosky.
Down-and-out but ambitious reporter Max Brackett (Hoffman) is at a museum covering a story on recent layoffs and financial difficulties when Sam Baily (Travolta), a museum guard recently fired during the aforementioned layoffs, storms the building wielding a shotgun and a duffel bag full of dynamite. Baily semi-accidentally takes his former boss Mrs. Banks (Blythe Danner) and a group of children on a field trip hostage, and accidentally shoots and wounds a fellow guard (Bill Nunn). Brackett hides in the bathroom and, sensing a story, immediately begins reporting in the incident. When Baily discovers him, Brackett fast-talks him into allowing him to serve as an intermediary between him and the police and aiding him in keeping the hostage situation going on for as long as possible, for the sake of the unbelievable ratings the hostage situation is bringing Max's channel.
List of tropes applying to this film:
- Anti-Villain: Sam Baily. He isn't particularly evil, just a desperate and not-too-bright man looking to provide for his family, and he treats the hostages very well. He only takes the museum hostage by total accident; he brought the shotgun to intimidate Banks and was locked in with the hostages when she initiated the lockdown sequence.
- Better to Die than Be Killed: Sam ultimately chooses to kill himself by detonating the dynamite rather than be arrested by the police.
- Downer Ending: Sam commits suicide rather than be arrested, and Max is left guilt-ridden knowing that he and his colleagues' exploitation of the hostage situation directly caused it.
- Heel–Face Turn: Max gradually starts to care about Sam and starts doing his damnedest to try to help him, though it ultimately isn't enough to make a difference.
- Immoral Journalist: Pretty much every reporter in the film are all totally amoral and perfectly willing to exploit innocent people while avoiding treading on the toes of the rich and powerful. The only exceptions are Max's camerawoman and Naïve Newcomer Laurie and - to a degree - Max himself, who genuinely aspires to be an Intrepid Reporter regardless of his many failings and amorality.
- Intrepid Reporter: Max wants to be this very badly, and it's hinted he was in the past before Hollander ruined his career and set him on the path to becoming the amoral sell-out he is today.
- Jerkass:
- Max initially, though he gradually becomes a Jerk with a Heart of Gold.
- Kevin Hollander is a resentful, callous prima donna who thinks nothing of destroying lives to get what he wants.
- Naïve Newcomer: Max's camerawoman Laurie is a recent hire and clearly unused to all the chicanery and amorality rampant in the media.
- Novelization: By J.H. Marks. An audiobook version, read by Reg Green, was released as well.
- Recycled In Space: The movie is Ace in the Hole updated to TV news and without most of the Black Comedy of the original.
