In this no doubt peculiar film that has a rather dated patina and production values that wouldn't bear scrutiny in today's world of slick multimillion endeavours however drove away at me and ended up surprising my, admittedly reduced expectations. There's a professional cast pulling out the stops to keep it going, and the way the story ended up left quite a visceral punch - even though the screenplay rather gives it away in the opening sequence in a chat show reminiscence by a witness, back in the real world, ie New York.
I like odd movies like this for the curveballs they can throw like the really confusing setting imagined for this country in convulsions. Where somewhere in Eastern Europe do all the military speak in rich English accents or American drawl and the character names seem so anglo-saxon? Where are there big sea freighters unloading British rail rolling stock? The little bit of folk music might have Balkan origin but where in Yogoslavia do they have so many sand dunes for the tank sequences? The 'terrorists' look like the young German Red Brigade or even Irish lackeys. The bit the few reviews can't fail to pick up is the faintly absurd torture of a young woman with electrodes attached to her nipples dispassionately supervised by the Blofelt-type Donald Pleasance (who is good here).
All the funny external elements are redeemed however I think by the seriousness of the whole thing and the repeated riff on home truths like perfectly understandable duplicity and cyclic violence that all such Coup-d'etat and by implication all revolutions can involve -despite best efforts from even good chaps. O'Tool's speech at the end about change and society is so deeply ironic and scary - be very scared of change old boy - a very British movie indeed.
I like odd movies like this for the curveballs they can throw like the really confusing setting imagined for this country in convulsions. Where somewhere in Eastern Europe do all the military speak in rich English accents or American drawl and the character names seem so anglo-saxon? Where are there big sea freighters unloading British rail rolling stock? The little bit of folk music might have Balkan origin but where in Yogoslavia do they have so many sand dunes for the tank sequences? The 'terrorists' look like the young German Red Brigade or even Irish lackeys. The bit the few reviews can't fail to pick up is the faintly absurd torture of a young woman with electrodes attached to her nipples dispassionately supervised by the Blofelt-type Donald Pleasance (who is good here).
All the funny external elements are redeemed however I think by the seriousness of the whole thing and the repeated riff on home truths like perfectly understandable duplicity and cyclic violence that all such Coup-d'etat and by implication all revolutions can involve -despite best efforts from even good chaps. O'Tool's speech at the end about change and society is so deeply ironic and scary - be very scared of change old boy - a very British movie indeed.