Rented Two Movies

I didn't like either one. Rescue Dawn. Eastern Promises. Both were violent. Both were matter of fact, like a list. This how this happens. In Rescue Dawn, it was "this is how a prisoner was treated, then escaped".

Rescue Dawn was about a pilot shot down in Laos, on a secret mission, or rather "mission into territory where nobody was supposed to know we were fighting" during the Viet Nam era. The pilot is captured and endures, with a handful of fellow prisoners, torture and hardships at the hands of the equally tormented starving Laotian guards.

He talks the others into an escape attempt, especially after one of the Asian prisoners overhears the starving guards speak of taking them into the jungle and killing them, claiming they did so when the prisoners attempted escape, so they can return to their villages and hopefully find food.

In the escape attempt, he is the only one who summons the balls to attack their former captors/torturers, to prevent them being immediately recaptured or killed. He and one other prisoner strike off together, while the others head off on their own.

They nearly starve to death in their quest to find American troops. In the end, his friend is killed by villagers they startle and he is is airlifted out when he is finally spotted by a plane. This movie is based on a true story.

There was nothing entertaining or intellectually stimulating about watching this movie. I know war is hell already. I had friends who went and fought in Viet Nam. I don't know why I rented it, couldn't find much of anything to rent, I guess.

The other movie, Eastern Promises, I rented because the movie store clerk said it was great. I thought it was boring and empty. A list of this is what happens in the Russian mob, but the story's scope was limited, very limited, so you were seeing really nothing of what goes on with the Russian mob, just what went on with one child molesting old Russian mob man and his one son, a homosexual drunk, who has a friend's throat sliced, wihtout telling daddy.

And with a KGB agent who had inflitrated this Russian gang of thugs. The plot tries to be interesting by starting with a dying pregnant teenager, who has written a diary one of the nurses steals from her handbag. The teen was pregnant. She dies. The baby lives. The nurse tries to find her family, and finds out instead, from the diary, that she was kept as a sex slave for this disgusting old Russian mob man. Barely interesting.

There is contrived sexual tension between the undercover KGB man and the nurse. He and the nurse save the baby, briefly stolen by the drunk son, in attempts to protect his father, when the KGB agent, using information from the diary, gets the police to arrest the father on child molestation charges, since they have the baby, with its DNA, as evidence. The KGB undercover agent wants the father, who runs the mob family, out of the way, so he can move in as number one.

The most laughable scene in the movie? When two brothers of the man the drunk son paid to have killed, attempt to also kill the undercover agent, when he's naked, in a sauna. A naked tattoed man, fighting, in a sauna, isn't sexy, to me, but I would think the writers must have thought so, and likely were gay men. The scene could have been left out but is one of the only interesting scenes in the movie.

Also, you have to pay close attention to the dialogue. Heavy Russian accented English is hard to catch. Or you can watch the periodic subtitles, which help some, if you can see them, on your little screen TV.