grendel-28

A British couple is kidnapped by the Chechens for a ransom of a million pounds - a ransom that nobody is able to pay. A Russian soldier is also a prisoner of Chechens but he ain't worth a dime. So the Briton and the Russian are let go - the former is told to come up with the ransom while his girlfriend stays with Chechens, the latter is sent with a message to hurry up the exchange of a Russian officer for the imprisoned brother of the Chechen warlord. Naturally, there is not enough money to buy back the British girl and no will on the part of Russians to exchange or rescue the Russian officer - so these two who were let go get back to Chechnya on their own accord to settle the affair in the Brat-2 style. With even bigger guns. Those who expect another art-house movie like Of Freaks and Men will be very dissapointed. This movie is as one-dimensional as they come: Chechens are evil, Russians are corrupt, Westerners and the press are hypocritical, Russian army is incompetent, so it is up to our hero armed only with a shotgun to take upon himself the Chechen war (vojna). At least there is an improvement to the Brat-2 movie - he doesn't have to make a shotgun from a waterpipe and two rolls of duct tape.

OK, folks, I was willing to give this movie a shot and just see it as it was coming at me, without going back to the text and wondering how come Glorfindel had a sex-change operation. But even one succeeds in separating Tolkien from the Lord of the Rings s/he still has to face the facts. The facts are: it's a bunch of mediocre actors (save two or three) thrusted into an animated Tolkien calendar. Young Mr. Frodo has only two facial expressions - sad puppy and happy puppy, and I quickly grew tired of both. Galadriel needs some cheap special effect to show the transformation as she measures herself up to the One Ring - people used to ACT this sorta stuff, you know. Gimli can only growl under all that makeup - good thing though, since his role has been reduced to a mere cartoon, his as well as those of Legolas, Merry and Pippin. The plot has been dumbed down, in two major ways: 1) the only way Jackson can show a conflict is to film a fight - everybody fights in this flick, Gandalf takes on Saruman, Aragorn goes into a swordfight with the Nazguls, Lurtz gets written into the script only to be hacked to pieces, etc. 2) there is no internal struggle, for anyone but especially for Frodo - he volunteers to be a Ring-bearer because everybody else is having a fight at the Council, he does not face Nazguls - at the Weathertop he just cowers under their gazes, at the Ford he gets carried away by Arwen, he does not ponder taking his friends to Mordor - they are running away from farmer Maggot anyways, why don't go to Mordor as long as they are at it? Stuff just happens in this movie. Altogether it's a sad story of how great special effects were wasted on one lil' director's lil' thoughts. Maybe if he wasn't so short he would not be so fond of cheap melodrama and Aragorn would be spared his (Jackson's) inferiority complex...

Blokpost stands out among recent features from Russia bridging the gap between the few artsies and an overflow of low-end thrillers. The script is decent as is the acting (apart from Buldakov's). Mebby I had too much of Bodrov Jr. lately but it's a pleasure to find that there are young Russian actors who can sound differently on different occasions throughout the movie. The movie is a story of a platoon of Russian Army, stationed in an unnamed but recognizeable rebel province, where it is to emulate peacekeepers and to provide military presence for "Moscow" at the same time. The storyline spans less than a couple of weeks spent on a remote outpost (blokpost) where the soldiers are given the task of checking locals for weapons. Platoon is largely forgotten apart from the investigation for the shooting of a civilian and a rebel sniper nearby. The story is somewhat wittingly narrated by one of the soldiers, the Bones (Skelet) but is filmed as a third-person view. As was noted by some the ending is quite predictable, and the not very cunningly hang rifle (an SVU in this case) shoots right where it's supposed to in full compliance with Chekhov's formula. But overall the movie is definitely worth a look.