YMMV / In the Line of Fire

• Award Snub:
  • Nominated for three Academy Awards (Best Supporting Actor, Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing), but won none.
  • While John Malkovich received an MTV Movie Award nomination for Best Villain for his role as Leary, he lost to Alicia Silverstone for The Crush.
• Fridge Logic: Leary could probably have avoided his misstep at the bank if he had just said something like, "Well, I'm not actually from Minneapolis proper. I'm from that area. I'm more from St. Paul if anything.". It is pretty common for people to name the closest recognizable city to where they're from. He also could have said, "Oh, I was homeschooled." Leary seems to be a pretty smart person, or at the very least a quick thinker with resources. He probably could have improvised here, or done some research in advance just in case. Plus, he didn't have to murder the bank teller regardless, who easily agreed she must have been mistaken about the (fake) high school he attended. It's quite possibly had he not no one would have known (her murder immediately raises Frank's suspicion when it's revealed).
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Thanks to Leary's manipulations, the police trace his phone call to the wrong address and end up terrorizing an innocent couple. The handful of Real Life examples of this can make one cringe (especially since the couple there are black, but thankfully unhurt).
  • Leary's intended assassination gun for the president is a homemade plastic composite gun, but thankfully, Frank manages to foil the plot. Sadly, another homemade gun (albeit larger and not made out of plastic, though it too sported twin barrels) would be used to assassinate ex-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2022.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The President's Chief of Staff (Fred Thompson) repeatedly dismisses Horrigan's warnings about an assassin due to the President being in a tight race for reelection. Thompson later became a US Senator from Tennessee and made an unsuccessful run for the Presidency in the 2008 Republican primaries.
• Ho Yay: Leary's fascination with Frank and his almost desperate need for Frank to understand his motives can easily be read as this.
• Magnificent Bastard: Mitch Leary is a professional assassin and ex-CIA asset who has resolved to assassinate the President of the United States. Leary is a Master of Disguise who can blend into any crowd and technically knowledgeable and proficient enough to sabotage any attempt by the Secret Service to trace his phone calls, and to construct a plastic handgun he can smuggle through a metal detector and assemble out of different parts hidden on his person. Leary gains an obsession with Secret Service Agent Frank Horrigan because of his ties to the Kennedy assassination, whose death Horrigan failed to prevent when he was a part of his service detail in Dallas. Leary frequently calls Horrigan to reminisce about his personal philosophies and the "game" between them, gives Frank clues on how to stop him, and even saves his life on one occasion. After killing numerous people who got in his way, Leary ultimately comes perilously close to killing the President before Horrigan's timely intervention, congratulating Frank on his victory afterwards.
• Narm:
  • Although Clint Eastwood can make almost any line sound badass, "You have a rendezvous with my ass, motherfucker" is an odd retort than even sounds a bit homoerotic.
  • The scene where Frank and Lilly (almost) sleep with one another. The age gap between their respective actors wouldn't be much of an issue by itself, but when you combine that with the ludicrous amount of weaponry and equipment they dump on the floor prior into getting into bed, it ends up coming across unwittingly reminiscent of watching Frank Drebin seduce a love interest.
• Nightmare Fuel: The deaths of Sally and Pam when Leary kills them both in cold blood. The answering machine message afterwards is just chilling.
• One-Scene Wonder: Tobin Bell as a ruthless counterfeiter in the Action Prologue.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The music for the rooftop chase sounds similar to the rooftop chase from The Untouchables. Probably intentional, since both movies were scored by the late Ennio Morricone.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Again, the deaths of Sally and Pam. They were two innocent, bubbly-headed women who had no business being killed by Leary and just died as pure coincidence. Hearing the answering machine knowing they aren't here anymore is quite brutal, too.
  • Frank's sad, weary confession to Lily about how much of a failure he feels like because he couldn't save JFK. He even admits that he'd prefer to have died saving Kennedy than to have to live with his death.
  Frank: If only I'd reacted, I could have taken that shot. And that would have been alright with me.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Part of the plot involves the President needing to win California because of its large number of electoral votes, indicating its status at the time as a key swing state.^note (Bill Clinton won it in the previous year's presidential election, but prior to that it had been won by the Republican candidate in every election since 1968, albeit usually by narrow margins outside of years where there was a Landslide Election nationally) Nowadays, California is such an overwhelmingly safe Democratic state that it'd be considered a waste of time and money for a candidate from either party to spend much time campaigning there, and the setting of the finale would more likely be somewhere like Florida or Pennsylvania.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Leary felt used and betrayed by the CIA, being let go from the only life he knew - one where he assassinated people for a cause that he later no longer believed in. Leary wants the most dramatic revenge possible against the government that he thinks used and discarded him.

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