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Whacking Permalink Archive 7 June 2004 Quite simply, the best world leader since Churchill. Wasn't afraid to call a commie a commie, nor to point out the USA's moral superiority to the Eastern bloc. He
won the cold war. Think about that one lefties, because it's true.
John Malkovich's directorial debut is an unusual beast. Terribly flawed, yet fascinating in many respects.
Based on the real-life story of the hunt for the Shining Path terrorists in Peru, the film begins brilliantly. Rejas and his team are called in to investigate an increasing number of strange incidents. Dead dogs are found hanging from light poles with revolutionary slogans pinned to their bodies. Seemingly pointless assassinations in remote areas of the country increase in frequency and begin targeting government ministers in the capital. Suicide bombers go to their deaths yelling "viva president Ezequiel!". Yet there is no manifesto, no list of demands. Just an increasingly brutal terror campaign directed at the government and its citizens. Malkovich does a good job in laying out the tenous nature of the newly democratic society Rejas is trying to protect. The cops have not received any pay in months. The government continually threatens to impose martial law. Rejas - a highly moral ex-barrister who regards the president as nothing more than a criminal - fights to keep the hunt for Ezequiel within the jurisdiction of the police and the courts. Yet his task seems hopeless. Under-resourced, fighting military interference, and horrified by the ideological lunacy of Ezequiel's followers (many of them seemingly normal teenagers), Rejas' investigation seems to be going constantly backwards. It's a brilliant setup for what could have been a mighty politcal thriller. Sadly, it just doesn't deliver on the promise. Malkovich wastes an eternity on an utterly prosaic romantic subplot between Rejas and his daughter's dance teacher (played snoozingly by Laura Morante). It has zero emotional weight, and seems only to exist to set up a predictable - and rather unconvincing - plot twist in the final scenes. Meanwhile, the fascinating political-thriller-manhunt atmosphere is pissed away. I imagine Malkovich saw the romance as the crucial to the story, as I guess it actually was in Nicholas Shakespeare's novel. Yet it simply does not work in the movie. The emotional impact of the story comes from seeing Rejas' fight to preserve the rule of law in the middle of a vortex of violence and corruption. The romance is not only dull, it's completely unnecessary. Another problem is Bardem. He is handsome, charismatic and a terrific actor, yet he really should have spent more time improving his English, which was woeful. Not normally having a problem with accents, I had to activate the subtitles to decipher his lines. Happily, the supporting cast didn't suffer from this problem. Oliver Cotton as the police chief and Luís Miguel Cintra as the Minister are excellent in small but crucial roles. Juan Diego Botto however looks too much like Penelope Cruz for me to take him too seriously. OK, not really: he was good, but the similarity is eerie. One
last thing: it is nice to see a movie where communist revolutionaries
are portrayed as they really are: violent, psychopathic, murderous thugs. Check
out Silent Running's view of the
D-Day invasion, if it had been covered by today's idiot journalists. No
one link, just go look at the June 6 entries.
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Set
in an unnamed Latin American country in "the recent past", Javier
Bardem stars as Rejas, a policeman caught up in the hunt for a revolutionary
marxist (ie. terrorist) known only as "Ezequiel".
