Hollywood bouquet to embattled UN: Director Sydney Pollack's suspense drama, The Interpreter, is timed to shore up support for the UN and promote the authority of the International Criminal Court.

That den of terrorists, thugs, and thieves on New York's East River known as the United Nations is in big trouble. Its secretary-general is implicated in the multi-billion dollar oil-for-food scam; UN "peacekeepers" are charged with raping and/or sexually exploiting women and very young girls in the Congo, the Central African Republic, Cambodia, East Timor, and Kosovo; one of the UN's senior officials from France ran an Internet pedophile ring that victimized hundreds of children and has been caught in flagrante delicto with a 12-year-old; the UN's Population Fund (UNFPA) continues to fund China's notoriously brutal program of forced abortion and sterilization; despotic dictatorships and terrorist regimes chair or help run UN committees on human rights and counter-terrorism.

That brief litany does not even begin to scratch the surface of the UN's ongoing cavalcade of crimes, abuses, and insults. Faced with such a public relations disaster and an American public increasingly receptive to proposals for cutting UN funds, or even for kicking the UN out of the U.S., what's a poor UN secretary-general to do? Call for help from Hollywood, of course, one of the few places on the planet with a concentration of anti-American, anti-Christian, and anti-freedom activists on a par with the UN itself.

Enter, stage left, Sydney Pollack, veteran director/producer/propagandist. Pollack reportedly huddled with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in a meeting set up by former Senator Bob Kerrey, who recently served on the 9/11 Commission. Pollack's proposal to Annan: The Interpreter, a suspense thriller with the UN itself as the star.

The embattled Annan was impressed and gave Pollack the keys to the kingdom, and Pollack and company have done their best to portray the UN as mankind's best hope for peace.

Although Mr. Pollack is a gifted craftsman and his film boasts two A-list megastars--Nicole Kidman and Scan Penn--the film doesn't quite work. Politics aside, it is too convoluted, with too many gaping plausibility holes in its plotline to be believable.

The movie plot swirls around Nicole Kidman, who plays African-born UN interpreter Sylvia Broome. Broome returns late at night to her glass booth above the darkened UN General Assembly room to fetch her flute and happens to hear two men whispering about an assassination plot. Unbeknownst to the conspirators, a nearby microphone just happened to be on and their plot just happened to be broadcast over Broome's earphones. The would-be assassins were speaking in Ku, the imaginary African tribal dialect of the imaginary African country of Matobo, which is obviously meant to represent present-day Zimbabwe. And Broome, who just happens to be one of the half dozen or so interpreters who understand and speak Ku, just happened to be in her cubicle for the few seconds when they revealed their scheme. Of course, the intrepid interpreter must inadvertently flip on the lights so that the killers will realize that they've been made, and so that they'll get a good look at her.

And--the chase is on. Will the killers succeed in their assassination of a head of state inside the UN General Assembly before a live worldwide audience? Will the killers get to Broome? Who are the killers? (Broome could not identify them and there are many who qualify as suspects). To make matters worse, Broome comes under suspicion herself by U.S. authorities whom she expected would protect her. Sean Penn plays Tobin Keller, the crusty U.S. Secret Service agent in charge of protecting foreign dignitaries, who distrusts Broome immediately. "She's lying," he tells his partner, after just a few minutes with Broome.

The target of the assassins is Dr. Edmond Zuwanie, who is clearly meant to represent Zimbabwe's murderous dictator, Robert Mugabe. Like Mugabe, Zuwanie was once hailed at the UN as a savior of Africa, but his time in power has proven him to be a genocidal megalomaniac rather than a messiah. However, unlike the fictional Zuwanie, Mugabe still has a big following among fellow kleptocrats and tyrants at the UN--despite the fact that he has become an embarrassment and a pariah to the media and academic elites who boosted him to power years ago. Zimbabwe, after all, currently serves as an esteemed member of the UN Commission for Human Rights.

Obviously, Messrs. Annan and Pollack were not going to name and shame such a distinguished friend of the UN as Mr. Mugabe. Hence, they disguised him as Zuwanie and camouflaged Zimbabwe as Matobo. In the closing scenes of The Interpreter (sorry to give this away and ruin the suspense for prospective viewers), the would-be assassin is killed in the nick of time and the plot is foiled. But then comes a turn of the table: Broome (Kidman), who is hiding in the secure room where Zuwanie has been put for safety, grabs the dictator's own gun, intending to kill him for the murder of her family and friends in Matobo.

Before she can pull the trigger, however, Agent Keller (Penn) talks his way into the room and finally convinces her that there is a better way. You guessed it: the answer is to turn Zuwanie over to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for UN-style justice. Quite possibly Mugabe's promoters in the UN will sacrifice him for a larger objective, and we soon will see a similar campaign launched to bring him--and a few other similarly notorious miscreants--to judgment before the ICC.

Created at a special UN summit in Rome in 1998, the ICC now has a gleaming new headquarters at The Hague, next door to the World Court. The ICC claims the authority to try individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Most of the world's countries, including regimes that are the worst offenders in those crime categories, have signed onto the ICC. The U.S. has not. Not yet, anyway.

As one would expect from a creation of the United Nations, the ICC is a monstrosity hiding behind noble rhetoric. In concept, it violates such fundamental principles as the separation of powers, checks and balances, due process, and clear definitions of crimes. And then there's that little matter of national sovereignty, which the ICC dispenses with altogether, claiming jurisdiction over the whole world, even over those nations like the U.S. that have not ratified the ICC treaty.

Like former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who was brought to bar at The Hague under a special UN tribunal, Mugabe and other villains will be offered up (along with genuine good guys who have been thoroughly vilified) to grease the ICC wheels and expand the court's global reach.

Sydney Pollack--whose adoration of Fidel Castro is obvious from his movie Havana, his statements about Castro in the so-called documentary Fidel, and his open support of Communist Party-sponsored pro-Castro rallies--is also a big fan of the UN and the ICC, which would be more suitably sited in Havana than The Hague.

Not surprisingly, liberal movie reviewers are effusive in their praise for the movie and its message. Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan was inspired by the film. "Equally impressive," he writes, "in a time when the U.N. has turned into everyone's favorite punching bag as well as an institution the U.S. seems to be in the process of disowning, is the film's implicit plea for this organization as the best way to deal with the world's difficulties."

Rolling Stone's Yvan Attal was, perhaps, the most effusive of all: "Talk about scene stealers. Nope, not Nicole Kidman ... or Sean Penn.... Those Oscar winners never had a chance. It's the United Nations building, pushing sixty, that turns on the charisma in its film debut--a smashing one--in The Interpreter."

"With a succession of scenes filmed in the General Assembly," says the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's William Arnold, "the Security Council and its various nooks, crannies and corridors, the 60-year-old building becomes the movie's third star and, in its director's viewfinder, mankind's only hope for the future." That, naturally, was the movie's real plot from the very beginning.