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Reviews
Black Hawk Down (2001)
Great music and the action is well portrayed and filmed.
I enjoyed Black Hawk Down: the music is excellent and really sets the tenor and tone of the film; and the action is well portrayed by the cast and well filmed and very exciting, though it do go on for a bit too long without a break for this old man and was a lot to take in. It is seemingly very realistic; although I am not qualified to make any kind of judgment on its actual realism as I have never been in action, thankfully, and had to fight in battle. However, I will say that that is an objective of many, if not most, war films: seeming true to real war to a lay audience who have never been in action and seen battle and are not likely to. The lighting effects in filming the battle sequences, too, were very good and effective, though at times the film's visual tones did remind me of looking through lightly tinted sunglasses at dusk. Overall, though, I did very much enjoy watching Black Hawk Down.
Crime Inc. (1984)
Very good documentary series on organized crime in the US.
When Crime Inc., a British documentary series, was produced by Thames Television and released on UK television in 1984, I can't say that I was greatly interested in organized crime in the US, or anywhere else for that matter: I'd seen The Godfather & The Godfather: Part II and that was enough for me. However, after watching Jimmy "The Weasel" Fratianno interviewed in this series and all the attendant surveillance footage from the FBI etc., I must say I found it pretty riveting stuff. When they talk about organized crime in the US, they really mean it: large-scale crime is organized there on an almost corporate basis and it is interesting to foreigners such as myself of the how and why large-scale organized crime has thrived in America for so long. As such, Crime Inc. is an excellent documentary series and it contains many interesting facts, recorded anecdotally and otherwise, about the Mafia in the US.
The British, it seems to me, actually make the best documentaries for t.v. and film generally and make the best documentaries on America and American subjects more particularly, and why this should be so, I cannot say; however, before I am accused of being excessively anglophile, I will say that I make such a statement with complete and unabashed bias, as I am English-born. No doubt many Americans will choose to differ: but it does seem that British documentary-makers filming documentaries in the US about the US are perhaps not weighed down with a lot of the local cultural baggage, preconceived notions, and locally biased views that some American documentary-makers have about subjects in their own country, and as such British documentaries on US subjects tend to be more, well, objective, as an outsider's view often is. That may well be why documentaries or documentary series for film or t.v. such as Crime Inc., produced 24 years ago now, worked, and still work so well.
Ronin (1998)
Interesting European espionage thriller but not great.
As shown in this film, Ronin, with the demise of the Cold War, spy stories as an espionage-based sub-genre of thrillers have been reduced to having to rely on terrorist organizations operating within a narrow regional locale, such as the IRA in this instance, substituting for the internationally significant, highly professionally subversive, and politically and militarily powerful KGB and the Warsaw Pact as the "enemy" organization/military bloc as the principal antagonist in European spy stories. While the IRA may be significant to Ireland and the Irish (and perhaps to a section of the British public, though I suspect that many Britons, including this English-born reviewer, are bored to the point of indifference with the "Irish question" and all that springs from it, including the IRA), it has not the same weighty international significance, and so literary appeal, to a wider international audience that International Communism's espionage arm certainly did in the form of the KGB and with the KGB, allied espionage organizations within other Warsaw-Pact countries.
This is one deficiency, but there are others. De Niro's freelance/CIA tough guy is very exaggerated at times; indeed, in my opinion, he ought to have played his part far more subtly in various scenes than he did. And Sean Bean's character of a Brit SAS-wannabe fraud infiltrating the ranks of the film's rogue IRA unit for the operation, for which this gang of mercenary operators was specifically engaged, leaves one wondering why this irrelevance was introduced at all and how Bean's character managed to get as far as he did without being exposed for the obvious incompetent and coward that he was. On top of this, too, I'd have to say that Reno's acting is a bit flat at times in Ronin; he has the opposite problem to De Niro in various scenes in that he does not inject enough zest into his part as he ought to, which zest would have been well within the emotional scope of Reno's character and consistent with and fitting to the relevant scenes' circumstances.
However, overall the story is quite interesting with the much sought-after and killed-for "case" being the MacGuffin, the object of interest for this group of rogue IRA operatives, their hired guns, and assorted Russian gangsters. There is cross and double cross and a good deal of professional betrayal worthy of a good spy story in Ronin, and add to this some really well done shoot-'em-ups and car chases and this makes Ronin an enjoyable enough film to watch. It is certainly worth a look and, to be sure, Frankenheimer does a quite competent job in directing it. But Ronin certainly could never be described as an extraordinary, great, or brilliant film, which another of Frankenheimer's films in the espionage-thriller sub-genre certainly was: I mean of course John Frankenheimer's 1962 classic The Manchurian Candidate. Now there was an extraordinary, great, and brilliant film, in which the Communist-Chinese-Soviet espionage arms figured most prominently and with which the IRA pales in comparison.