Savior

Savior

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DVD Reviews of Savior

DVD Review: Violence, Revenge, then Redemption
Summary: 3 Stars

Joshua, played by Dennis Quaid, is an American Military Official living in Paris with his wife and infant son. When war breaks out in Bosnia, he informs them that he has to leave to go to Bosnia as an observer. Before he leaves, his wife and son are killed by Moslem terrorists when the café they are sitting in is blown to bits by a bomb. In a state of rage, Joshua runs into the nearest Mosque and pumps several bullets into the back of a man who is kneeling in prayer.

Joshua escapes to join the French Foreign Legion, where he is given a new name. He then joins the Serbian army, circa 1993. As a soldier, he is a perfectly efficient killing machine. He follows orders and kills without emotion. After a truce is declared, a young boy chasing a ball obliviously approaches a demarcation line. Joshua tracks him through the scope of his sniper's rifle. When the boy crosses the line, Joshua coolly executes him. In the next scene, a young, pretty girl crosses the same line, in another spot, where Joshua's buddy is on guard duty. He reacts to the girl like a normal human being. She casually blows him away with a hand grenade.

As a result of the murder of his wife and child, Joshua is dead inside, but he has found a place for himself in the Serbian army, in the war zone in Bosnia.

Unfortunately, up to this point in the movie, my feeling was that this was just another senseless, action/violence thriller, but it was just sufficiently different to keep me going.

Joshua gets assigned to escort duty in a prisoner exchange with Moslems. One of the prisoners he receives is a young, civilian Serbian woman named Vera, played by Nastassjia Kinski. She is pregnant as a result of being raped and is close to giving birth. She appears traumatized. Joshua's job is to drive her back her family in her home village. On the trip to her village, she gives birth almost right away. She is totally indifferent to the baby and does not respond to it or care for it in any way. She is as indifferent as to the baby as Joshua is to killing children. They are both emotional basket cases.

But this is when Joshua starts to change. With a woman and newborn baby in his care, he starts to show sign of humanity. He tries everything he can to try and get Vera to care for the baby. There is a language barrier. She is practically catatonic towards the baby. He continually urges, pleads, annoys and harasses her to get her to care for the baby. Eventually, he starts to make some progress; he gets her to breast feed the baby. On part of the trip, they spend one night in the home of a couple where the husband is a Croat and the wife, a Serb. They give them a bottle and diapers. For a while they travel with a fellow Serbian soldier who is from Vera's village. He hates Moslems and wants to kill the baby, since it is half Moslem, by blood. Joshua executes him. When Joshua and Vera get to her village, she is rejected by her father and told to leave the village because she is pregnant.

There are no good guys in this movie. Atrocities are committed by all sides. The death of Joshua's family by Moslem terrorists and his joining the Serbian nationalist army to act out his desire for revenge is intended to be a personal microcosm about how the historical conflict started and carries on. I'm not going to tell you who lives and who dies.
The movie is worth seeing. Although the movie is about what happens to Joshua, you get some idea of what the conflict has done to the people that live there and what their life is like. By comparison, news reports and CNN seem to exist in the abstract. In the movie you also get an idea of the medieval mentality (revenge killings, the shunning of women who have been raped) in the region. Beware; the killing scenes will make you shudder.

I like the fact that the Serbs are not singled out as the bad guys, anymore than anyone else. The Croats are portrayed badly, but maybe this helps balance out the bad public image of the Serbs to give all parties in the movie the proper balance.

In her role as Vera, Natassja Kinski appears extremely unattractive, as you would expect from a character who has been imprisoned and gang raped. As the movie goes on she starts to appear more attractive. I don't know if it's my imagination or if this was done by design. She is an actress very comfortable in her own skin.

No doubt, redemption and salvation are what the Serbian director wishes for Serbia. However, Joshua's redemption is paltry and inadequate, and as a savior, he is a dismal failure.

Description of Savior

Quaid is Joshua Rose, an American in Paris traumatized by the death of his wife and child in an Islamic terrorist bombing, wreaking immediate and fateful vengeance on innocent Muslim worshippers, then escaping into a new life as a mercenary supporting Bosnian Serbs. Under the nom du guerre Guy, Rose is a remorseless, nearly comatose presence until he intervenes in a brutal attack on a Serbian woman (Natasa Ninkovic) pregnant from a Muslim rape. Guy's gradual immersion in his charge's destiny brings him face to face with the centuries-old political, religious, and cultural feuds that haunt the region, and Quaid's own salvation comes through a remarkably subdued, sober performance. That restraint, and Quaid's haggard, close-cropped features are all but unrecognizable to those more familiar with his cocky, grinning turns as a more conventional hero.

Antonijevic makes the journey absorbing and, ultimately, elegiac, punctuated by a few brief but convincingly gruesome action sequences including a civilian massacre that would have been the climax of a more conventional war film. Instead, it's Quaid's own epiphanies that distinguish this probing, heartbreaking drama. The DVD edition retains the original widescreen aspect ratio and includes an audio commentary from the director. --Sam Sutherland.