Lima: Breaking the Silence

I began to see the movie thinking that I was going to enjoy it. And you know what?: I did. It is so bad that most of the time I couldn't help it but laugh. Who was the movie's historical advisor? A Mexican citizen? A Chicano? It is no wonder that Disney did "The Emperor's New Groove" and everybody loved it, having that Hollywood thinks of all Latin-Americans as Mexican-like clones. The music is so bad chosen that I almost forgot that I was seeing a movie about Peru and started looking for "Zorro" or Speedy Gonzales. For God's sake! Couldn't they put some real Peruvian music?

Moreover, the dialogues, situations and characters are so ridiculous that I am wondering how Christopher Atkins agreed to do this movie. Poor guy! And with him, all the other "A-Team" and "MacGyver" extras that acted here.

How could anybody possibly think of terrorists in Peru as romantic, heroic heroes, so charming and cult that a foreign ambassador held as hostage would fall in love with one of them after one night? And what about the American journalist that managed to hide himself for months among the crowd of hostages before being recognized? Give me a break!

This film is so bad is not even worth reviewing, in fact it shouldn't be even here, it should be in the Internet Trash Data Base. It makes look hispanics, chinese, japanese, and all other races except americans. It's so stupid the terrorists look like the true heroes and the actors that portray them look like models. If the terrorists looked like that why bother being terrorists if they could make a career in modeling. The movie is plain stupid, it has all the cliches of what a latin american should look like. The writers think that all countries look alike, images of the president and flags everywhere, the jails are the worst, the cops are crooks, and the crooks are cops. The president always on fatigues come on this movie is just so idiotic, besides Cristopher Atkins is the star that should be enough to drive you away!!!

Okay, this movie is directed by Menaham Golan, produced by NuImage and shot in Sofia, Bulgaria and shares half the cast with the movie "Armstrong" and was made in the same year, so I'm guessing they may have been shot back to back.

There aren't really any heroes in this movie, Joe Lara is a rebel leader who takes the Japanese embassy hostage but as far as I could make out he's not really a bad guy. Billy Drago is CIA, but is more of a bad guy and doesn't fair well at the end of the movie.

It tries to make Bulgaria look like Peru unsuccessfully, as it's very obvious it's shot in a former Soviet country, and there are numerous bad fake Spanish accent and not a single ethnic Peruvian in it! But it's not as bad as the other reviews would suggest though. It's obviously factually very incorrect, but if it wasn't trying to be based on real events it's quite competent.

Richard Lynch, Charles Napier, Joe Lara were all in Armstrong. Napier had very little screen time in Armstrong, so they probably flew him over to do one movie and persuaded him to shoot a few scenes for the other in short notice! So overall, I'd recommend this to anyone who liked Armstrong, and of course to anybody else who likes a decent low-budget action-movie.

This "film" pretends to dramatize the ordeal of the people who were taken hostage by MRTA terrorists in Lima, Peru, in the Residence of the Ambassador of Japan. Instead, we get a story which has Japanese officials playing mariachi music, terrorists and hostages dancing the tango, and the terrorist leader going to bed with the Dutch Ambassador. As a person who lived not 10 blocks away from what really happened, this movie is simply an insult to all involved.

The only positive thing I can say about this movie is that it makes other low production films look good. Truly appalling acting, woeful dialog, pissweak stunts, it made other "I can't believe they made that" films such as Frozen Impact and Octapus 2 look like Oscar material. This is a hostage film where you couldn't give a toss about what happens to the irritating captives, or the so-stupid-they-deserve-to-die terrorists. Out of all the dreadful things in this film (too many to count), the thing that really summed up this movie for me was a supposedly ritzy party scene where the waiters in the ballroom were carrying trays bearing wine? champagne? you might ask, no...two glasses of water each. Wow. Lame.