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.
