Avenger

This is when you boil it down, a story about conscience. Conscience being pulled this way and that by the conflicting poles of revenge and justice. If you like Sam Elliott's work and I do, you will very much enjoy this spy story. The story is not overwhelmingly original but the way the steps unfold, I stayed intrigued by it all the way. The assembly of details and camera style and the music all very high quality choices. "Cal Dexter" has more complexity than many similar characters of this genre. Timothy Hutton does a lot with little dialog. Lucy Russell was attention grabbing in a small part. I look forward to seeing more of her work. I liked the settings (South Africa in particular) and the overall visual style.

I liked it. Sure it was kinda silly and certainly flawed but it entertained me for 2 hours. Mostly this is due to Sam Elliot; always a compelling screen presence. The first half of the movie pulled me in and seemed somewhat believable. Then there was the second half. Like the part with the pilot and how carelessly Dexter endangers her. That was a total amateur move and at odds with his previously established professionalism. This is when the movie started going off the rails for me. That and the cartoonishly evil senator willingly to do whatever it takes to complete Project Whatchamacallit. Then the ending, again Dexter displays amateurism and was lucky, ridiculously lucky, to get away with what he did. But, then again, stuff blew up real good. Hey, it was an entertaining enough flick and if it ever turns into a TV series I'll watch it, but then again I used to watch MacGuyver.

The film is based on the novel by Frederick Forsyth, who coincidentally also penned "The Kill List, "The Day of The Jackal" and "The Odessa File", all which became films. His craftmanship is nothing short of cat/mouse routine. The film turned out to be rather well done. A TNT made for TV movie with Sam Elliot ( Roadhouse, The Mask) at the helm as a former Vietnam Special Forces cleaner. There is great character drive in this film and Timothy Hutton plays a CIA operative sent to stop his character. The plot is very good as Elliot's character is out to right a few wrongs. Strong delivery, great pace of the film and well worth a look at. I give this 6 out of 10

This is a story we would all like to live, if not then you do not live in the "real world". We all want to get even with the person that did us wrong, the only problem is we would never get away with this. We would all like too but we can not. We all have dreamed of getting back at a friend/neighbor or ex and we try and think about the ultimate revenge but this is the best that it can be. I guess we can dream. Maybe some day we can all try and make a statement that this film makes until then have a great life and think about how you all treat people, cause if you treat someone wrong you maybe be avenged, then maybe Sam Elliot may visit you.

You can see it is a television movie. There is not much quality to it. They didn't put a lot of effort making this movie. Maybe with a higher budget the movie could have been better. You could do something decent with the story, even though it's one of those typical I'm-a-good-guy-with-a-conscience-and-take-all-the-bad-guys-down-by-myself. It's a revenge action movie, but one without a budget, and I'm sorry to say not great acting. Sam Elliott has been better in other movies but in this one it's all cliché and average. It's clearly been made to entertain a television public on a rainy day. It's watchable but that's about it. I would rather pick another movie if you haven't seen this one. I'm sure you can find better without having to search too far.