Opération Hadès

The first part of the series was good as a movie in general. But I, being a fan of the book, was disappointed that the story was loosely based on the Gayle/Ludlum work. I have wanted them to make a movie out of this series of books for some time now. And I guess in my anticipation and already thinking about how the movie would be, I was a little angry. I can understand the director fast forwarding to recent events, but changing some of the backgrounds of the characters and COLONAL John Smith being out of USAMRID. But again, as a movie, without reading the book, this was a good story. Sorry, I just had to find a faucet to vent my thoughts.

If you enjoyed the Dustin Hoffman movie Outbreak, the TV series 24 and X-Files and the HBO/BBC series TheCell, and wondered what would happen if you mixed them altogether, then this is the result.

It trundles along at the usual pace of all the above, with Stephen Dorff doing his best Jack Bauer impersonation, in both looks and personality. Naturally the love of his live is offed fairly early on and that sets up the lone-agent working to recover the truth. Very 24'esque.

The X-Files element is all the government conspiracies that are woven into the plot and that makes for more distraction than anything else. The story is a good one on its own merit, no need to keep mixing in nonsense that really only serves to bog down the movie.

But on the whole it is a good watch.

Lt. Smith (Dorff) is a former member of Covert One a government spy agency. Smith is engaged to Dr. Amsden (Myles) both having worked on virus outbreaks in the past and present. When a hemorrhagic virus named Hades, first seen during the Soviet Afghan war, starts to pop up in the USA, the government tries to hide the potential threat while investigating where it came from and race to create a cure. Terrorists are involved in this action thriller, and infiltrate far easier than one would imagine. Rachel (Sorvino) a renegade Covert One operative and everyone she comes in contact with dies. As Covert One tries to untangle the web to nab all those involved, it becomes clear that the origin of this plot is a old enemy. A sad thing is that it reinforced negative racial and cultural stereotypes. But it was on par with B+ or A- movies.

Movie runs for about 3 hours (as it was made for TV in two parts). Many portions were predictable in the second part. Though not as interesting as MI , it is worth watching once.

Average.

This is the third bad (not good) movie in a row based upon novels by Robert Ludlum. I think that Ludlum is just too complicated for modern-day Hollywood, whose directors, producers and writers have all formed themselves by watching MTV music clips and PC Video games. Accordingly, this film is too fast, too short and too simple to be able to even begin doing justice to the novel. There is absolutely no character building, we have no insight into the motives, no details about the plot, etc...

In my opinion, the only decent filming of a Ludlum Novel was the first 'Bourne Identity' made sometime in the 80-ies. But then, those where completely different times...