Dir: Peter Antonijevic
Star: Dennis Quaid, Nataša Ninković, Sergej Trifunović, Nastassja Kinsi

Nastassja’s character dies in this one. That doesn’t count as any significant spoiler, since her death takes place a scant four minutes and thirty-eight seconds after the production company logo appears on the screen, about three and half minutes before her name has even appeared in the credits. There, her name appears immediately after Quaid’s, and as shown below, in virtually the same size font: given this, I spent the rest of the film waiting for her to make a re-appearance, perhaps in some kind of flashback sequence. I needn’t have bothered. She gets exactly two scenes: one in a church, listening to a sermon, immediately followed by the other in a Parisian restaurant. There, her embassy-employed husband Joshua Rose (Quaid) shows up, for a family outing, only to be called back to work. Barely is he inside the door of the embassy, however, when a bomb explosion tears apart the restaurant, killing both wife and son. Exit Nastassja, likely wondering if she can reach the bank to cash her check before it closes.

The incident unhinges Rose, and he subsequently shoots up a mosque, blaming Muslim terrorists for the incident. Whisked out of Paris, he joins the French Foreign Legion under an assumed name, and is sent to the disintegrating state of Yugoslavia, where he can continue killing Muslims to his heart’s content. However, the atrocities committed by fellow soldier Goran (Trifunović) prove too much, even for Rose: when Goran brutally assaults a pregnant woman (Ninković), Rose shoots him. The woman, Vera, gives birth shortly after, but refuses to care for the baby, because it’s the result of her being raped by Muslim soldiers. Rose, thus, finds himself the unwilling foster parent of the newborn child, and has to tend the infant while taking both it and Vera through the war-torn countryside, in search of a secure place where he can leave both mother and child, without feeling too guilty about it. That task is made much trickier, after Vera is rejected by her family.

Yeah, if I seem kinda bitter, it’s the bait and switch performed by the movie. Is this site called dennis.quaid.us? I think not. So, watching him stagger around the disintegrating Balkans, wailing baby in tow, is not something which would generally be high on my list of chosen leisure activities. It’s such a painfully earnest and obvious film, especially once the baby shows up: Rose’s path to redemption will be strewn with dirty diapers. This is a shame, since the start certainly packs a wallop: I can’t say the restaurant blowing up came as an enormous surprise, there’s something about the way the scene is set up, and the almost saintly way in which Nastassja is depicted, that is close to painting a bulls-eye on he back. It’s similar to the way, when a soldier in a war film starts showing around photos of his wife and kids back home, you just know they’re not going to make it to the end of the movie. Still: less than five minutes? Should have merited an “and Nastassja Kinski,” or even a “with Nastassja Kinski” in the credits, not second billing. This is me shaking my fist in disapproval.

While I’m here, I suppose I might as well mention the rest of the film. When your hero walks into a mosque and opens fire on innocent Muslims, it certainly digs a deep hole for the audience’s sympathies towards him, and I was curious to see how the script would get him out of it. The solution was mostly to put him beside someone even worse, in the shape of Goran, who thinks nothing about cutting off the finger of an old, bed-ridden Croatian woman, because he wants the ring she has on. Or repeatedly kicking a pregnant woman in the stomach, because she has been “defiled” by being raped. Yeah, that makes him a much worse person than Rose. But, conversely, it also makes him a much more interesting one. We know why Rose is the way he is. What could possibly have brought Goran. to a point where these kind of actions are something he can perform without a second thought? Well, we’ll never know, as a burst of gunfire from Rose draws all speculation to a premature close, and we’re left to follow the path taken by second-most evil person in the movie instead.

I have a cheerful aversion to babies – I was fortunate enough to marry someone whose kids were already in progress, so I happily got to miss out entirely on the stage where they are basically machines for generating excrement. Initially, Rose seems to share this disdain, but inevitably, his heart eventually melts, and he shows himself prepared to risk his own life to save that of the child. Though personally, I’d have been more impressed, had he taken responsibility for the act of mass slaughter which he committed in Paris, and accepted the consequences: saving one kid doesn’t seem to me to be more than a token gesture at balancing the moral scales of his previous acts. As Shakespeare put it, “I am in blood stepp’d in so far, that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.” Except, Rose decides to return, and yeah, the journey back does turn to be largely tedious. The only sequence with any power has a Serbian militia stopping a bus, escorting the passengers off and… It’s not pleasant. Let’s leave it at that. The feeling this atrocity is an everyday thing for the perpetrators, is chilling indeed.

It doesn’t seem particularly even-handed, concentrating more on the Serbs, with the Croats mostly the victims. But that’s not among the film’s major flaws, when put beside its simplistic morality and unengaging execution, in which men are little more than Neanderthals, and women saintly baby-producers. Produced by Oliver Stone, a man not exactly noted for subtlety [much though I live the polemic shriek that is Natural Born Killers], I didn’t reach the trite and implausible ending feeling enlightened or emotionally challenged in the slightest. War is hell, m’kay? But anyone with two brain cells to rub together doesn’t need a Dennis Quaid, even one seeking redemption for a dead Nastassja, to tell you that.