SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Donald Seymour This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

leplatypus This disturbing movie of Costa-Gavras reminds me about the closely named episode of the X-Files (5.18) in which Mulder like Debra goes undercover to dismantle a right wing militia (and it's also the proof that this show had really incredible quality !). In a way, Costa could be the European Spielberg as the two can tell strong, political story on the level of the common people and without any propaganda. Here, the militia members are totally crazy and criminal but if most of them are really devious, a few and the kids are just lost souls. The same can be said about the law enforcers : some does a clean work but others can't see that they push the limits and that they use Debra against her will. In that way, Debra is similar to Diane in « NYPD Blue » in which undercover mission is indeed a kamikaze one.What's frightening is that this movie is from the 80s. As seen in a sequence, it was a time when Internet wasn't there. You can see that the militia is using a rudimentary network with Amiga computers to chat together and it's also a computer printout that will be the trigger of the showdown. So you can imagine what happens now in those circles ! I got an hint with « American History X » but those kind of movies are rather not the kind of drama and cop movies nowadays. At last, it's also a 80s movie as the cast has also more talent than those today and it's a bit sad that we can't see anymore Debra or Tom Berenger now.

tonybutler2435 This movie is in the top 5 of my most favorite movies of all time! Not only was it very well choreographed it was also incredibly revealing! I remember so many of the mysterious events, as this movie has revealed, in a period of time when there were unsolved murders of black folks found in Rock Creek Park from 1980 through 1986. Many people would find these true events revealed by this movie unbelievable or too far fetched! We live in the melting pot and everyone has the freedom to think and feel the way they do! I'm a black man born and raised in these United States and can understand the plight of the white supremacist. You will believe in what you were taught and raised to believe but some have come to know that we are all related because we all were created from and by one GOD! It's truly an incredible movie!

gretz-569-323863 I was going to rate this movie a 6, but at the last minute gave it an 8 instead, because I saw it for the first time on cable a week ago, and I can't stop thinking about it.there are definitely "plot holes you could drive a truck through," as they say. the biggest one is something other reviewers have noted. Debra Winger's character Katie/Cathy is forced to go back and continue her undercover work (pun intended) several times, even though there's PLENTY of information to convict all of these people on multiple charges many times over. I guess it's good to know the FBI is so scrupulous about the "righteousness of their busts" but seriously...!other people have mentioned the "night hunt" scene. I watch a lot of movies, horror movies especially, but I have to say that this was one of the only times I've ever literally watched a scene with my jaw hanging open. I got the impression that the crimes were supposed to "ramp up" somehow throughout the movie and get more and more serious, but the hunt scene was far more awful than anything that came after.the movie is beautifully filmed. one scene in particular caught my eye: it's early in the courtship of Gary and Katie, and they've just come back into his house through the front door, which is still open. they stand facing each other, the farmland beyond framed by the door, and the trees all blowing in the wind. I finally figured out that it reminded me of that great (and very windy) scene in "The Quiet Man" and borrowed by "ET" with John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara. I do not know if that was deliberate on the part of the filmmaker, but it was really pretty either way.

jc-osms You have to admire Costa-Gavras for at least taking on touchy subjects in his Hollywood movies - Nazi-collaboration war crimes in "Music Box" and the frustrating search for truth after the disappearance of relatives in world hot-spots in "Missing", but here he lets his predilection for delivering a thriller compromise his intentions in exposing the barbarism and inhumanity of white supremacists who masquerade under the guise of normality.After the brutal slaying of a controversial shock-jock after a typical heated programme on the issue of race, we cut to an apparently innocent country-girl (Debra Winger), cutting the fields of a young, good-looking, recently widowed land-owner in the American south (Tom Berenger) and her gradually inveigling herself into his family and affections. Of course it turns out she's working undercover for the authorities in attempting to bring to light the nefarious doings of a terrorising cell of ZOG, a right-wing racist group following a neo-Nazi agenda (although without the attendant paraphernalia) strongly suspected of the hit and of whom Berenger is the alleged leader.But what could have turned to be a still-relevant morality tale on the dangers posed by such monstrous people and how they can pass themselves off as ordinary average people in society, gets thrown off-kilter by too much focus on the moral dilemmas it puts onto Winger's character and a propensity to deliver cheap supposedly end-of-your-seat thrills in the best Hollywood tradition.Winger, irrationally you would think for a hardened agent, it seems falls in love and into bed with Berenger almost immediately and in short order becomes his fiancée as well as the adored new mother to Berenger's cutesy kids and prospective daughter-in-law to his protective mother. From there she ingratiates herself into Berenger's ZOG organisation, undergoing a throughly disgusting initiation involving a night-time manhunt to brutally kill as sport, a young terrified Negro and then taking on a Patty Hearst-type role in a bank-job to fund the planned hit on a politician whose death will supposedly foment racial tensions and presumably invoke a WASP uprising.Besides the last item there being hi-jacked from "The Manchurian Candidate", it's all just too improbable for words and falls under the weight of its own however well-intentioned pretensions. Winger's part requires her to do little but simper when Berenger is nice to her and protest when her boss keeps telling her to go back in to finish her job. There's little she can do to make us think this honey-trap situation could ever have happened in reality plus the love-interest between her and her boss only further distorts credibility. Berenger is however very good as the handsome country boy farmer with a dark side but again you could never imagine him opening himself up lock stock and barrel to Winger's character so soon after his previous wife had learned about his other life and paid for it with her life.There are one or two thought-provoking scenes, besides the gruesome man-hunt mentioned above, particularly the stomach-churning scenes where Berenger's infant children start spouting racial bile once Winger gets engaged to dad and the slightly more subtle encounter between her and a seeming nice-guy who nonetheless betrays his ignorance and bigotry the deeper they converse round the camp-fire of the Ku Klux Clan brotherhood.By the time, however, we get to the inevitable conclusion with Winger and Berenger in an armed stand-off and later again when Winger heads back out to Berenger's young daughter's school for what reason I can't imagine, the film has imploded under the weight of its own sensationalism and conflicting aims.Like I said at the start, it was brave of the director to take on this subject (and anyone who's since seen Louis Theroux's Weird Weekend encounter with a latter-day real-life group of American white supremacists at work rest and play will concur that people like this do exist) but the whole is just too far fetched and unbelievable to hang together as it should.