Okay, Mel Gibson is a drunken, fundamentalist Catholic, Anti-Semite. We don't approve of his statements or behavior. Let's get that out of the way.

Still, you can't ignore his acting before he fell from grace due to his own offensive beliefs. And he and Julia Roberts do a bang-up job in this overlooked Hollywood conspiracy thriller from a few years back. It's especially relevant because it involves a rogue CIA assassination unit. Anyone recently read about Seymour Hersh's revelation that there was a secret assassination unit that reported only to Cheney?

So this is one conspiracy theory in a movie that has a lot of timely relevance, even though it was made some time ago.

Actually, time has proven "Conspiracy Theory" to be prescient.

Yes, there's a lot of violence in the film -- as well as a quirky, offbeat budding romance between the "crazed" conspiracy theorist (Gibson) and a lawyer in the U.S. Attorney's office (Roberts). And there are occasional chase scenes that are thrilling but push at the edge of the credibility envelope a bit.

But the basic "conspiracy" upon which the film is based has, apparently, proven true (although the assassination unit reporting to Cheney is allegedly part of the military, not the CIA). And Gibson does a convincing job of portraying a poor man's Jason Bourne, spewing out his conspiracy theories to passengers in his New York taxi cab.

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