Obratnyy otschet

"Moscow Mission" follows the efforts of a 5-member Russian anti-terrorist unit to locate and capture an international terrorist who is responsible for a series of bomb explosions around the world and whose next target seems to be located somewhere in Moscow. A slickly made, well-produced film, "Moscow Mission" shows that Russian cinema is not limited to political or art films, but can make Hollywood-style genre pictures as well. Admittedly the film is a little different from what I expected: I thought it would be along the lines of the German "The Clown", filled with large-scale stunts and explosions, but it is more of a "race-against-time" suspense thriller, with a strong emphasis on computers / technology. The pace is frenetic but the action itself is limited: there is one long and intense fight between the "new recruit" of the team and the terrorist's bomb expert (I won't mention the setting or the details), but it is somewhat spoiled by too many MATRIX-like gimmicks. The team of the "good guys" is certainly offbeat, with the character of the blind guru who can "sense" if and where explosives are placed requiring quite some suspension of disbelief. The two women involved (a profiler and a computer hacker) are beautiful, with Anastasiya Makeyeva in particular showing legs on the level of Anne Hathaway in "Get Smart". **1/2 out of 4.