ASSIGNMENT, THE By Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Triumph Films Director: Christian Duguay Writer: Dan Gordon, Sabi H. Shabtai Cast: Aidan Quinn, Ben Kingsley, Donald Sutherland, Claudia Terri, Lilliana Duguay
In his New York Times op ed piece which appeared two days after Princess Diana's death, A.M. Rosenthal compares the paparazzi to an animal. ""The paparazzi pursued the couple as a jackal his prey. They knew that a good picture like a kiss or hug seen through a car window would bring scores of thousands of dollars and that any picture would bring a price handsome enough for their gas and waiting time until the next gathering of the jackals."
The label "jackal," unfortunately, might be looked on by some human beings so named as a badge of honor. The master-terrorist Carlos Sanchez, who allegedly took pleasure in killing and maiming innocent men, women and children in the service of Middle Eastern and European clients, could scarcely object. Though chased for twenty years by the CIA and the Israeli secret service known as Mossad, Carlos, like the wily beast whose nickname he probably cherished, was able to slip through their grip time and time again.
"The Assignment," a movie inspired by the Jackal's wicked acts, could have been just another action-adventure picture: good guy searches for bad guy, good guy caught, bad guy ultimately nailed. But director Christian Duguay, employing a tense screenplay by Dan Gordon and Sabi H. Shabtai, focuses not on the terrorist himself but on the psychology of a man who resembles him strikingly. Duguay aspires to show us that there is a dark corner inside the souls of all people, an intersection which we avoid under normal circumstances but one which can be crossed given the right instruction. "The Assignment" deals with a rather ordinary man, a family-loving Naval officer who is deeply patriotic, who is seduced into taking on a dangerous mission and suffers a dramatic change of his very character as a result. Featuring intense action and psychological probing, "The Assignment" is like a James Bond adventure played with total seriousness, which has been filmed with technical expertise in Budapest, Israel and Montreal as stand-ins for Moscow, Norfolk, East Berlin, and Tripoli.
When Annibal Ramirez (Aidan Quinn) is touring Israel after his ship has docked at Haifa, he is picked up by the Mossad and brutally questioned until the intelligence agents realize that he is merely a lookalike for Carlos. Realizing that they had found a gold mine, they press him into their service. Mossad agent Amos (Ben Kingsley) and C.I.A. operative Jack Shaw (Donald Sutherland) have a plan to rid the world of its most notorious assassin by having Ramirez impersonate him. In effect, they make him recap the motif of summer action movie "Face/Off": To find him, he must become him." Rigorously trained like the Bridget Fonda character in "Point of No Return," Ramirez is not only able to fulfill the requisites of the job--to kill, to survive isolation, even to make love like Carlos--he actually internalizes the terrorist. More than any other human being outside of the man himself, Ramirez feels Carlos's anger and must ultimately struggle to pull back to his own, far gentler, identity.
While the shootouts ostensibly taking place in Libya are tense, they feature the usual cliches of the action-adventure mold rather than the intricacies of good spy movies--car chases, jumps from rooftops, hot pursuits by bands of generic thugs, sinister-looking Communists, beautiful women. The most notable part of the film, however, is the training program which the agents have designed, a program of the sort that only G.I. Jane and James Bond would be expected to pass. He must above all be observant: able to count the cups, saucers and plates in a kitchen cabinet in four seconds; to know the name and location of every gravestone he passes so that if a name is called, he can draw his weapon and shoot the ghostly figure which emerges behind the stone. Most difficult of all, he must eat porridge day and night, sometimes eight bowls at a time, to reach the depths of anger which Carlos feels. (The terrorist as a child was forced to down the sludge by his atypical family.) He must even survive a trip on L.S.D. which the agents have secretly administered to spice up the breakfast cereal, a trip which--captured by a motion control camera to replicate the demons he appears to face-- represents an excursion into the very soul of the serial killer.
With his classical Irish good looks, Aidan Quinn has been typically cast as a romantic lead. Not this time. His performance in a double role as a man who turns from gentle, family man to utterly amoral and immoral murderer is a riveting one, one which allows him successfully to extend his range. With Donald Sutherland's ironically smiling face as C.I.A. operative repeatedly egging Ramirez on and Ben Kingsley's less histrionic but equally passionate fervor driving the stakes forward, Christian Duguay has helmed a thriller with superior performances from the key figures, adding to the insight gained from such movies as "Donnie Brasco" into the scope of our passions. While Carlos himself is safely in a maximum security cell in France, a country which had seen the terrorist mastermind the deaths of many women and children, we sense that the real work which went into his capture has not been shown. The movie is, however, an intelligent, imaginative bit a fiction about suggesting one way the killer may have been captured. Rated R. Running Time: 110 minutes. (C) 1997 Harvey Karten
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews