With a stary cast and some great Montreal location footage, this had the potential to be an enjoyable thriller, but is plodding and slow. It's very generic in the category of movie thrillers with Donald Sutherland playing a role he's played over and over again, an overly serious man with a criminal agenda involved in situations that seem to be impossible to get out of. Here he is a hitman whose wife has disappeared, and when he's assigned a hit, he finds out that the people involved are possibly behind his wife's disappearance. Of course he takes this as an opportunity to seek revenge, and pray you think that would leave two lots of chase sequences and shootouts and intrigue, the result is a movie that is painfully slow for much of the time.
With David Warner, John Hurt, Christopher Plummer and Virginia McKenna in support, it's a major disappointment to see good actors wasted in a film that moves slowly to resolve each situation Sutherland finds himself in. The photography is good and the editing tight, but the plot seems to be giving the indication that the writers thought very highly of themselves as they put the script together. It's another film that thinks it's much more intelligent and complex than it is, and the result is a convoluted mess that is totally disappointing. Roman Polanski's 1987 thriller "Frantic" is a much better film with a similar premise. There are reasons why certain films fall Into obscurity, and this is an example of one.
With David Warner, John Hurt, Christopher Plummer and Virginia McKenna in support, it's a major disappointment to see good actors wasted in a film that moves slowly to resolve each situation Sutherland finds himself in. The photography is good and the editing tight, but the plot seems to be giving the indication that the writers thought very highly of themselves as they put the script together. It's another film that thinks it's much more intelligent and complex than it is, and the result is a convoluted mess that is totally disappointing. Roman Polanski's 1987 thriller "Frantic" is a much better film with a similar premise. There are reasons why certain films fall Into obscurity, and this is an example of one.