birck

A few here have complained that the film is confusing and doesn't make sense. I was watching it with someone who missed one short patch of dialogue about midway, or just didn't consider what it meant, and was left at the end wondering what had happened and why. The crucial dialogue is the assignment each of the main characters gets from their mutual boss individually, although we are only shown one of the two. That assignment is what drove the film for me. The story is, on the surface, about an effort to determine what went wrong in an airline hijacking in Vienna 8-10 years previously, when all of the main characters were on assignment in Vienna. Why did it go so badly? If someone in the agency was responsible for the disastrous outcome, who was it, how did they do it, and what should be done about it now, almost a decade later? It kept my attention, it moved right along, and it made sense to me in the end.

I looked into it, and was encouraged to find that this is Mr. Swickard's fourth film. Out of the five main characters, his performance was the least convincing. So he has some work to do. As another reviewer noted, the supporting cast and the female lead were what makes the film worth watching, if watch it you must. There's nothing about the story that makes it appropriate for Christmas. It may as well have been centered on the Fourth of July or Flag Day. At least the story makes some sense: the farm is about to be lost to foreclosure, but there is one part of the farm that saves the day, and it is shown to us near the beginning of the story.

This series starts out with an unbelievably artificial situation, and never recovers. The first scenes are in an anonymous-but-extensive cellar, with a complicated, carefully-built torture device dead center. A torture device supposedly built by a maddened vengeful fiend, but a fiend with a lot of spare time and a knowledge of hydraulic engineering. How many of these elaborate fiendish scenarios ever actually happen? The kind of rage it would take to dream up anything that elaborate just doesn't mix with the discipline and skill required to actually build it. Many of the review headlines here are spot-on:"I wanted to Like it; Distracting Amateur sound; A little confusing;" The sound is so poorly recorded that I couldn't follow the story. I couldn't interpret the mumbled lines, even with an auxiliary sound system with plenty of clear treble. The characters, whether well-acted or not, are flat. Period. The attempt to create the atmosphere of an FBI office fails-none of the characters seems to have any motivation. Could this be because it was filmed in the Balkans(specifically Bulgaria)? Well, so was Cold Mountain, and that won 4 Oscars. So that aint it. The dialogue varies between predictable and unconvincing, and does it badly, at that. What is onscreen is usually gloomy, dark, hard to interpret, confusing, and frankly unconvincing. I gave up after 4 episodes.