Starring Mel Gibson, Julia Roberts and Patrick Stewart, the original screenplay by Brian Helgeland centers on an eccentric taxi driver who believes many world events are triggered by government conspiracies, and the Justice Department attorney who becomes involved in his life.

Experiencing terrifying hallucinations and flashbacks, Jerry manages to escape after biting the interrogator's nose, but is injured when the wheelchair he is taped to falls down a flight of stairs and a metal rod pierces his abdomen.

When Alice returns the next day, the criminal has died from an alleged heart attack and the police, along with the FBI and the CIA, arrive to ID the body, believing it to be Jerry's.

In the room below, Alice is startled by a mural of her riding a horse - something she gave up after her father's murder - and the triple smokestacks of the Ravenswood Generating Station.

Ditching the agents by causing a traffic jam on the Queensboro Bridge and switching cars, he drives her to her father's private horse stables in Connecticut.

Instead, he became friends with the judge, remembering the inmate who was denied the appeal was actually innocent, and promised to watch over Alice after her father was mortally wounded by another assassin.

Observing Alice from a car with Lowry, Jerry - whose death and burial had been faked by the secret agency - reaffirms his agreement not to contact her until the rest of Jonas's subjects are caught.

Among the numerous conspiracy theories mentioned by Jerry include Rockefeller Center, fluoridation, the United Nations, the JFK assassination, Watergate funder Armand Hammer, the "New World Order", Freemasons, the CIA, the Vatican, microchipping of pets, Moon landings, Pearl Harbor, and silent "Black Helicopters".

That facility is owned by United States Equestrian Team member Peter Leone—who coached Julia Roberts through the scene at movie's end, where she gallops her horse across a field while Mel Gibson's character looks on longingly from a vehicle driving on a nearby road.

[5] In her review in The New York Times, Janet Maslin said, "The only sneaky scheme at work here is the one that inflates a hollow plot to fill 2¼ hours while banishing skepticism with endless close-ups of big, beautiful movie-star eyes ... Gibson, delivering one of the hearty, dynamic star turns that have made him the Peter Pan of the blockbuster set, makes Jerry much more boyishly likable than he deserves to be.

The man who talks to himself and mails long, delusional screeds to strangers is not usually the dreamboat type ... After the story enjoys creating real intrigue ... it becomes tied up in knots.

"[6] Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly graded the film B− and commented, "Richard Donner ... switches the movie from a really interesting, jittery, literate, and witty tone poem about justified contemporary paranoia (and the creatively unhinged dark side of New York City) to an overloaded, meandering iteration of a Lethal Weapon project that bears the not-so-secret stamp of audience testing and tinkering.

"[7] In the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle stated, "If I were paranoid I might suspect a conspiracy at work in the promoting of this movie—to suck in audiences with a catchy hook and then give them something much more clumsy and pedestrian ...

"[8] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times observed the film "cries out to be a small film—a quixotic little indie production where the daffy dialogue and weird characters could weave their coils of paranoia into great offbeat humor.

"[9] In Rolling Stone, Peter Travers said, "The strong impact that Gibson makes as damaged goods is diluted by selling Jerry as cute and redeemable.

"[10] Todd McCarthy of Variety called the film "a sporadically amusing but listless thriller that wears its humorous, romantic and political components like mismatched articles of clothing ...

"[12] In his 2003 book A Culture of Conspiracy, political scientist Michael Barkun notes that a vast popular audience has been introduced by the film to the notion that the U.S. government is controlled by a deep state whose secret agents use black helicopters — a view once confined to the radical right.