★ 6 / 10
At the start of this, I did wonder
CinemaSerf
At the start of this, I did wonder what on earth was going on. Sven-Bertil Taube (a sort of Jon Voight lookalike) was an odd choice to lead. Hardly an…
At the start of this, I did wonder what on earth was going on. Sven-Bertil Taube (a sort of Jon Voight lookalike) was an odd choice to lead. Hardly an household name, quite possibly not even in his native Sweden. Anyway, he arrives in Amsterdam where he doesn't even make it out of the airport before the bodies start dropping. Turns out that he is there to put a stop to a lucrative cocaine smuggling operation feeding the USA. He is not exactly flavour of the month with local police chief "De Graaf" (Alexander Knox), and so must do most of his investigating with the aid only of his friend "Astrid Lemay" (Ania Marson). A dastardly priest; garish gingham dolls, way too much dodgy flute music and a secret kingpin all lie in his path as he tries to thwart this successful industry. There is quite a fun motor boat chase giving a scale of just how the canals in the city interlink, but that ends rather unspectacularly - as, indeed, does the whole thing. It's made up of C-list "James Bond" types, and though there are a few quips in Alistair Maclean's self-adapted dialogue, this adventure is just a really weak and dated operation all round.
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★ 7 / 10
Chain Reaction
Lejink
On paper, this movie had potboiler written all over it. A fledgling director, forced to share the task, an almost unknown cast, low budget and a presumed…
On paper, this movie had potboiler written all over it. A fledgling director, forced to share the task, an almost unknown cast, low budget and a presumed ho-hum adaptation of yet another Alistair McLean adventure story. But don't be misled, this is actually an entertaining, even exciting thriller, with a credible story, well acted with good location work in Amsterdam and featuring as its highlight an action-packed motor-boat chase through the city's tight maze of canals.
It starts arrestingly with a callous triple murder with the killer casually and noiselessly walking into a house and silently executing his three defenceless victims and follows it up with another surprise murder at Amsterdam airport, this time of an Interpol agent meeting up with a colleague. Said colleague is the film's principal man-hunter, played with Scandinavian stoicism (although he's supposed to be American), by Sven-Bertl Taube, who accompanied by his English, female contact in the city, former lover (as we learn) Barbara Parkins, tracks his quarry to a ruthless drug-smuggling ring, whose base appears to be of all things a monastery, which sidelines in manufacturing and dispensing toy dolls and bibles for the tourist trade, but which secretly contain packages of heroin. This gang thinks nothing of executing suspected informants or suspicious investigators and signifies their deaths with a symbolic "puppet on a chain", one of the toy dolls hung by a chain.
Being Alistair McLean, there's a major plot twist at the end when the gang-leaders are revealed which I admit I didn't see coming for once, itself following on from the aforementioned hair-raising pursuit through the waterways as Taube a chases the baddie more for personal revenge than for the ends of justice.
Like I said, there was a lot to like about this movie. The direction, although shared, I found to be pacy and engrossing, the acting above average, besides Taube and Parkins, I enjoyed seeing Mr "Voice of a thousand adverts", Patrick Allen in a cinema role for once and who ironically for a man famous for extolling the benefits of newly-built houses in the U.K. from a helicopter, finds himself in a life or death situation outside a building where a chopper might have been of benefit to him.
Sure the fashions, a cheesy disco sequence and an intrusive Euro-electric soundtrack date it somewhat but this on the whole was a gritty, low-key thriller which I really enjoyed. And trust me, I'm not yanking your chain when I say that.
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6.0/10
1.5K
