Tag: terrorist

Black Site (2022)

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★★★
“Better Red(box) than Net(flix).”

This has a fair amount in common with the disaster which was Interceptor. Both films were produced for streaming companies, and are about a sole woman in a remote military location, that is attacked by a terrorist or groups of terrorists. She then has to survive, take on the threat, deal with treachery on the inside, and handle a ticking clock scenario. It is fairly basic storytelling, occasionally dumb, and there’s nothing of note in either, we haven’t seen a hundred times before, with male or female leads. However, this is significantly more watchable, perhaps because it doesn’t push the envelope. One problem with Interceptor was its #MeToo messaging. There’s no such soap-box concerns here, and Black Site is better for it.

The heroine is Abby Trent (Monaghan), a CIA analyst whose husband and daughter were blown up in a terrorist attack on an “Istanbul” hospital. I use quotes, because when the camera zooms out to a satellite view, Istanbul has apparently relocated, from Turkey to somewhere down the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia. It’s not the last time the film’s geography is shaky. Anyway, Abby devotes her life to tracking down “Hatchet”, the man responsible, and is currently working at a secret interrogation facility in the Jordanian desert. Two things about it made me go “Hmmm.” Firstly, it doubles as a data storage location: that’s a no from me in IT. Second, a Mossad (Israeli intelligence) agent is wandering about. Seems unlikely.

Anyway, #2. Hatchet (Clarke) is captured and sent to the facility, only to escape almost immediately. A lockdown is put in place, but comms get cut off, and the rules – at least in this movie – are that after an hour, they’ll be deemed compromised, and a drone strike will wipe everyone out. Abby has to figure out Hatchet’s agenda, deal with insubordination and flat-out double-agents on her side, and discover the truth about the hospital bombing before the clock runs out. Despite the various idiocies noted above, it is all kept moving forward at a decent pace. Once things kick off with Hatchet’s Houdini-like escape and particularly vicious stabbing of his first two victims, there’s little slack or down-time until things go boom.

I’d like to have seen Monaghan given more to do on the action front. There is a decent fight against the in-house traitor; otherwise, she is largely limited to creeping about corridors with a gun. There are subplots, such as the team member who thinks his active experience puts him above taking orders from Abby, which ends with him taking on Hatchet hand-to-hand in a decent battle, albeit with an entirely expected outcome. Indeed, the same can be said for the film as an entity. There are no surprises, yet the action is handled in a professional manner, and this helps paper over the obvious flaws. Director Banks does solid work, considering this was her first feature, so we’ll see where she goes from here.

Dir: Sophia Banks
Star: Michelle Monaghan, Jason Clarke, Jai Courtney, Pallavi Sharda

American Zealot

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★★★
“Constitutional wrongs.”

As I write this, in December 2021, abortion is again a bit of a hot topic on the American political scene. I am, personally, fairly neutral on the topic. Or, at least, to the point that I’d need to spend the entire review outlining my position. Such nuance tends not to fly on the Internet, where you are either a baby-killer or want to turn America into The Handmaid’s Tale, and moderation is for pussies. On that basis, this film is a bit of a losing proposition, likely destined to satisfy no-one with its relative fair-handedness. These days, it feels like everyone just wants their echo chamber reinforced, rather than challenged, even in the mild way this offers.

It is, certainly, a fringe entry here. Lucy (Mackenzie, the director’s fiancée at the time, now wife) is a girl. Who uses a gun. So there’s that. An action heroine though? Not so much, at least in the genuinely understood definition. Like the topic of abortion, it’s complex. For Lucy is in her final year at a Christian high school, and is shocked to discover that her classmate and best friend, Rachel (Marie), has terminated her pregnancy, in defiance of everything Lucy holds dear. After a moral conundrum (basically, the trolley problem) is posed by a teacher, Lucy decides to save future lives by shooting the doctor (Carey) at the women’s clinic, using a gun belonging to the parents of a classmate, Ralph (Miller). However, does Lucy have the moral fortitude necessary to buttress her actions, or will her qualms about the act lead her down a different path?

Though Mackenzie is too old to make a convincing high-school girl (per the IMDB, she was 28 when this came out), it’s a good performance. You can see the way in which her beliefs lead Lucy down the path, to a point where her actions do not just make sense, they are almost required as a result of those beliefs. Less successful is the “de-programming” element, which largely consists of her teacher blustering, “You can’t sacrifice the minority to save the majority. That’s just not how good society functions.” Well, about that… Seems more like a problem with society, to be honest. It’s an angle which needed more effort applied to it, in order to be convincing.

It is also perhaps a little too understated for its own good. The shooting of the doctor is so low-key, you could blink and miss it, when in many ways, it’s the most important moment in the movie, and should have been weighted in accordance with it. Still, given the budget here was just $11,000, this is no small accomplishment. It looks and sounds like a far bigger budget production, and credit is also due to both of the Mackenzies, for being prepared to take on a challenging topic in a way that tries (largely successfully) to avoid being judgmental. While many independent film-makers go the commercially easy route of genre movies, this is something more challenging. If not without flaws, it should succeed in provoking thought.

Dir: James Mackenzie
Star: Ana Mackenzie, Kendall Miller, Keana Marie, Kristin Carey

And Tomorrow the Entire World

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★★★
“Chewy, yet slightly crunchy.”

Plenty of films in our genre use violence, either as a tool of the plot, or simply for entertainment purposes. Fewer consider the philosophical and moral underpinnings of violent acts, in the way this does. Luisa (Emde) is the daughter of a rich, aristocratic family who is now a law student. She rebels against her upbringing by joining the P81 commune which is fighting against extreme right-wing groups in Germany. But there is a growing schism in the commune, between those who are opposed to injurious violence, and those who feel the ends justify the means. As Luisa drifts into a relationship with group leader Alfa (Saavefra), she finds herself drawn increasingly to the latter camp – albeit without an appreciation for the potential consequences.

It would be easy for this to descend into political polemic, yet it largely manages to avoid that. Luisa and her pals may be “fighting the good fight,” but they’re clearly not without significant flaws. For instance, Alfa regards the group as his own, personal all-you-can-eat buffet of young women, with Luisa just the next platter. It also does a good job of illustrating the slippery slope, from civil disobedience through property damage to full-on violence against people. At which point, I’d say you lose the moral high ground, and the film acknowledges it can become counter-productive. As someone says after a clash between left- and right-wing factions: “They are angry, really angry, and who’s going to pay? You, Alfa? No, it’ll be someone, somewhere, who had nothing to do with this.”

It’s still a shock when the full force of the German state and (the apparently infamous) Section 129 of their criminal code, is dropped on P81, making Luisa and Alfa fugitives. They hide out with Dietmar, a former activist in the 80’s, who spent time in jail for his acts then, and now lives quietly, working as a nurse. He offers a particularly cynical view regarding the futility of their actions, based on his own experiences: “We were absolutely convinced that we could build a new society. I was going to be a minister.” This is lost on Luisa, who steals a hunting rifle from her family’s home and prepares to launch an assault on an enemy gathering.

The film opens with her tossing away the gun, but at that point it’s not clear whether this was after, or instead of, its use. It’s on that decision that the film’s climax pivots: will she step back from the precipice, or embrace wholeheartedly what it means to take a life, even of someone you regard as lower than an animal? [Pointedly, Luisa is vegetarian…] This was Germany’s entry for the 2021 Best Foreign Film Oscar, though it did not make the final list of nominees. It definitely has that sense of earnestness the Academy likes, and is not so much biased ignores any other side exists – which may be the point, it being easier to hate someone who is kept distant and seen only as “the enemy.” But even an entrenched old hack like myself still found it more thought-provoking than I expected.

Dir: Julia von Heinz
Star:  Mala Emde, Noah Saavedra, Tonio Schneider, Luisa-Céline Gaffron

The Dublin Hit, by J.E. Higgins

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

What’s most unusual about this book is its heroine. For many years, Sauwa Catcher operated as a killer for the racist South African government during the apartheid years, hunting down their enemies at home at abroad, and gaining the justifiable nickname ‘Angel of Death’ as a result. Yeah. This is not exactly the kind of person with whom you should expect to sympathize. Indeed, generally someone like this would be the villain of the piece, yet Higgins manages to make it work, far better than you would expect.

This takes place not long after the fall of that regime in the nineties, when South Africa set up a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission”, to come to terms with the crimes previously committed. Catcher had been operating in the UK, and with her support network gone, accepts a commission from a Northern Irish paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force. In exchange for funding Sauwa’s vanishing off the grid, they want her to assassinate a leading Republic of Ireland police officer, who has been feeding intel to the UVF’s mortal enemies, the IRA. But doing so will bring down not just the wrath of the Irish police, but also the IRA. Additionally, her South African past is trying to catch up with Sauwa, as one of the most notorious tools of the old government, and a team has been sent over to bring her to justice. They’re in for quite a hard task.

So, how do you make the tool of an infamously racist regime sympathetic? Mostly, it’s by carefully crafting her background. Sauwa in not South African, but came from Rhodesia, now known as Zimbabwe. That country had its similarly racist government replaced with something arguably worse, in the shape of dictator Robert Mugabe, and she saw her family slaughtered in the wholesale violence which followed. Sauwa became a refugee, moved to South Africa, and vowed to do whatever she could to prevent the same thing happening there. That started her down the current career path. It’s a case where you may not agree with the character’s decisions, yet you can see the logic in them. Even the black soldiers hunting her, former “terrorists” themselves, know where she’s coming from, and are similarly haunted by their experiences. One of them says, “I feel more akin to her – another fighter in the trenches.”

It also helps that Sauwa only kills when necessary. Though, of course, her definition of “necessary” is perhaps different to yours and mine! There is only one extended action sequence, a night battle between Sauwa and an IRA unit on a beach. That’s mostly because she is simply better than everyone else in terms of experience and tactics, that while there are other conflicts, they are over pretty quickly. Her behaviour is as much about, for example, being aware of her environment and making sure she is not walking into a trap.  Here, Higgins’s military experience does seem to prove useful, and strikes a nice balance between not enough explanation and over-burdening the reader with unnecessary detail. I’m very much interested in seeing where the story goes from here.

Author: J.E. Higgins
Publisher: Mercenary Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 3 in the Sauwa Catcher series.

SAS: Red Notice

  By

★★★
“Train of thought derailed”

“Less than one percent of the population is psychopathic. Psychopaths often inherit the trait, and are incapable of love. They manage their relationships with clinical precision, succeeding in all walks of life. Psychopaths that can learn to love are even more rare. As rare as a black swan.” That voice-over opens this British action flick, whose main twist is the presence of female villain, Grace Lewis (Rose). She’s part of a family business, a mercenary group that gets its hands very dirty; we first see them clearing the way for a pipeline in Eastern Europe, with automatic weapons and flamethrowers. When footage of their exploits are leaked, an Interpol “Red Notice” is issued – basically a worldwide “wanted” notice. Their employer is none too happy, and that employer just happens to be the British government. So they send a snatch squad, led by special forces operative Tom Buckingham (Heughan), to capture the family.

Grace escapes, and plans savage revenge for the perceived betrayal. She takes hostage a train from London when it’s in the Channel Tunnel, and threatens to blow the tunnel (and various bits of other infrastructure) up, unless she gets 500 million pounds and safe passage. Fortunately – and what are the odds? – Tom is also on the train, taking doctor girlfriend Sophie Hart (John-Kamen) to Paris to propose.  Grace is always one step ahead of the authorities under George Clements (Serkis), thanks to a mole deep in the establishment. Tom thus becomes the world’s only chance of stopping an incident which appears increasingly likely to result in the loss of several hundred lives, as the psychopathic Grace’s plans become clear.

This brought home just how rare a true female villain is in our genre. By which I mean, one who is: the main antagonist; possesses few if any redeeming features; and who doesn’t end up becoming the heroine (I’m looking at you, later series of Killing Eve). Outside of fringe entries like Basic Instinct or Fatal Attraction, in terms of Western films reviewed here, there’s perhaps The Huntsman: Winter’s War, with Charlize Theron, Demi Moore in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle… and I’m kinda stuck [Other countries have perhaps done better, with films like Angel, À l’interieur (Inside) or Temptress of a Thousand Faces] Rose, recently seen here in The Doorman and who was Batwoman for one season, is an excellent choice, and you genuinely believe she’s capable of the most heinous of acts.

The problems largely lie elsewhere, most obviously the script which has little to offer beyond being Die Hard on a train. The attempts to make it seem that Grace and Sam are fellow psychopaths don’t work, with Heughan having nothing like the necessary edge. It’s better when it’s not exercising pretensions to depth, and concentrates on bringing the mayhem. Though even here, the underground setting does occasionally leave the viewer literally in the dark. Still, as a way to spend two hours on a Sunday afternoon, this was solid enough, and certainly succeeded in holding our attention, especially when its villainess was on-screen.

Dir: Magnus Martens
Star: Sam Heughan, Ruby Rose, Hannah John-Kamen, Andy Serkis

Lethal Dispatch, by Max Tomlinson

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆½

“There are no heroes”, I said. “Just varying levels of evil.”

Having previously read and thoroughly enjoyed, the same author’s Sendero, picking up this entry, in the same setting and with an overlap of some characters, was a no-brainer. And I’m pleased to report, it was an equally enjoyable read, once again opening a window to a time and place in history, of which I was largely unaware. The heroine this time is Inez, a supporting character from Sendero. She’s a teenage revolutionary, who joined Peru’s Shining Path rebel group, after her father was killed by government soldiers. As we join her here, the now 16-year-old Inez has had enough and wants out. She’s told she can leave, if she completes one final mission: deliver a package to a contact in Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires.

As ever, that “one final mission” does not go as planned. Her contact ends up dead, and she’s left with no resources, on the streets. A new friend tips her off to a job as a children’s nanny – though it’s in the family of one of Argentina’s generals, who represents virtually everything Shining Path detests, and who helped carry out mass disappearances when the military junta was in control. When her charge, Joey, is kidnapped, Inez becomes embroiled in the case, both as a suspect and as she seeks to find the perpetrators. Winning the general’s trust, she becomes a key player as the situation unfolds. But is Inez truly a player, or is she being played?

The quote at the top is an accurate summary of the book’s position. Whether neo-communist terrorist or crypto-fascist military, Tomlinson does a great job of depicting everyone as, above all, human. You may not agree with their actions, yet you can see why they took them – even those who kidnapped Joey. The one element I did find a bit hard to believe is the way a young nanny was allowed, at some points, to dictate the path of the investigation. Admittedly, her intelligence and her instincts were often dead-on, more so than the professionals. That’s credible enough, because her terrorist background meant she knows how they think. It’s just that in 80’s South America, where this is set, I doubt the opinions of teenage girls were highly respected.

Otherwise, however, this was another very solid work. It has a well-laid out plot which twisted until the very last page, where you finally find out what Inez’s package contained. Though she is not exactly Atomic Blonde, our heroine has her occasional moments. These are perhaps summed up best in this line, as she heads out to face Joey’s kidnappers: “With twenty minutes to go, I headed out into a beautiful late-summer evening in Buenos Aires, with twenty-five thousand dollars in a plastic shopping bag and a small pistol down my bra.” The matter-of-fact way in which Inez describes this, tells you all you need to know about her ability to handle any situation. If you like a heroine who remains cool under pressure, this is the perfect read.

Author: Max Tomlinson
Publisher: Sendero Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
A stand-alone book in the Sendero universe.

Savage Justice

  By

★★½
“Justice: yes. Savage? Not so much.”

In an unnamed third-world country, which looks suspiciously like the Philippines, unexpected turmoil catches American diplomats by surprise. Trying to flee the country, the Howard family are caught by the rebel force run by Sanchez (Vernal). Mom and Dad are killed, while daughter Sarah (Montgomery) is abducted by the rebel leader. Fast-forward a year, and it looks like Sarah has gone more or less full Patty Hearst. She has joined the revolution and become Sanchez’s main squeeze – much to the unhappiness of the previous incumbent. But, it turns out, Sarah was only playing a (very) long game, and waiting for the appropriate opportunity. When she goes along on a raid of a nearby town, she jumps ship, instead teaming up with local guy Rick (Memel) to defend the locals against Sanchez and his gang, intent on extracting revenge for her year of abuse. And she knows the location of the perfect arms cache which will help them. Though getting to it might be another matter.

There’s certainly no shortage of action here. The problem is that most of it – in particular, the bits involving our heroine – isn’t very good. She’s not exactly Cynthia Rothrock shall we say. Her fighting skills are more on a par with… oh, let’s say, someone whose main (and, arguably, only) claim to fame is being in Revenge of the Nerds. Oh, she seems game enough, and the enthusiastic approach by director Romero does help paper over some of the cracks. But you wonder how far down the list of picks the producers had to go before settling on Montgomery. I feel it was quite some distance.

Not that this in entirely devoid of pleasures. For example, the arms cache is located inside an abandoned ship, located inside the territory of what can only be described as a midget warlord. Corlon (played by the inappropriately-named Rey Big Boy), and his devoted followers, appear to have wandered in from a Philippino theme-park inspired by Mad Max. When they catch Sarah, Rick and their crew skulking around, Corlon royally proclaims they can go free if she can best his executioner in single combat. Which, of course, she does, thereby gaining the respect and admiration of the little ruler, who is far more interesting than the ultra-bland Rick.

Then there are the Buddhist monks, whom she also recruits. It’s a bit… disconcerting to see these saffron-robed men of peace, laying down suppressing fire from a 50-caliber machine gun, or piloting a power-boat, which has been converted into a kamikaze vessel. These are the weird elements which kept me acceptably entertained, when the main plot and lead actress, largely failed to do so. Disappointingly, we didn’t even get the expected cat-fight between Sarah and Sanchez’s once and former girlfriend. That annoying bastard, Rick, robs us of this small pleasure with a single shot. Nor is Sarah’s battle against Sanchez much to write home about, yet the sheer volume of running gun battles did keep me awake.

Dir: Joey Romero
Star: Julia Montgomery, Steven Memel, Ruel Vernal, Chanda Romero

Sendero, by Max Tomlinson

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆

When you think of drugs, terrorism and South America, Colombia probably comes first to mind, thanks to Pablo Escobar and his cartel pals. However, it’s far from the only country in the region with a troubled history. Peru has had its fair share of strife: it produces virtually as much cocaine, and the Marxist guerillas of the Shining Path movement fought a long, bloody war against the government through the eighties. It’s during this time that the novel begins. Young girl Nina has her father killed by soldiers hunting the guerillas in her rural village, and her brother Miguel vanishes to join the Shining Path.

More than two decades later, Nina has grown up to become a cop in Lima, with the dirty war against the Shining Path apparently over – the terrorists have now, effectively, merged with the drug traffickers. She encounters Malqui, the former village priest who spent eight years in prison for protesting the murder of Nina’s father, and mentions knowing someone who had recently met Miguel. However, before she can get any more information, Malqui is picked up by the authorities and vanishes into the dark network of secret prisons. For it seems the dirty war is not as over as is publicly stated. To rescue Malqui – and perhaps be reunited with her long-lost brother – Nina is going to have to get her own hands dirty as well.

I must confess, I confused the title with “sicario,” the drug cartel term for hit-man. Between that and the cover, I was expecting something… different. Turns out, sendero is Spanish for “path” – and those who support the guerillas. Quite whether this includes the heroine is an interesting point. After the death of her father, it seems odd for her to end up as part of the government authorities, yet she becomes part of the “resistance” as she seeks to locate and free Malqui. Though by the end of the book, it’s clear that the remnants of the Shining Path are no more the solution either, with their morality little if any less problematic. The entire novel could be printed in various shades of grey: even Nina is prepared to do bad things for what she perceives as a good end.

As such, it’s a very thought-provoking read, and opened my eyes to the history of a country about which I had never known much previously, and its social and political struggles. If there’s a weakness, it’s probably the way in which Nina ends up taking a seat in the second half, with the story’s focus shifting to Miguel and his colleagues in the Shining Path [though among them, Comrade Inez does partly fill in for the lack of Nina]. It’s a shame, for Nina is an excellent heroine: one who never forgets either where she came from, or where she wants to be, and is willing to risk everything for others, in a highly altruistic manner. Hopefully, the second book is all Nina, all the time.

Author: Max Tomlinson
Publisher: Sendero Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 2 in the Sendero series.

Neerja

  By

★★★★
“Sticks to the plane truth.”

Time to set up GirlsWithoutGuns.org, perhaps. For this film brings home that among the most courageous of heroines are the unarmed ones – especially when facing people who are not. Such is the case with Neerja Bhanot, the 22-year-old head purser on Pan Am Flight 73 from Mumbai to New York in 1986. Just before takeoff after a stop in Karachi, the plane was taken over by hijackers from the Palestinian Abu Nidal Organization, who intended to divert it to Cyprus. Bhanot alerted the pilots, allowing them to escape and thwarting that plan. She then discarded the passports of American passengers, stopping the terrorists from targeting them. When they believed Pakistani forces were about to storm the plane, she opened the emergency exits, help shepherd passengers out, and sheltered children from the terrorists’ bullets.

Yep, there are good reasons she became the first female recipient of India’s highest decoration for bravery in peacetime, the Ashok Chakra Award, and the youngest ever. Wisely, the film opts for a largely straightforward retelling of the events of those 24 hours, beginning with Neerja’s exuberant attendance at a birthday party the previous evening, through her trip to the airport and the mundane processes of the early, peaceful leg of the flight, before all hell comes storming up the stairs into her aircraft. Against a solid background, the only element which rings significantly false is the note given to her by a friend at the airport: its clichéd contents perhaps explain the disclaimer before the movie, about “Any resemblance to persons living or dead…”

Otherwise, however, it seems to stick to the truth, as far as my post-film Googling has been able to tell. Yes, Neerja was a part-time model as well as an air hostess. She also had already been through an arranged marriage which failed, to an apparently abusive husband (though here again: “Any resemblance…”). But it’s her amazingly calm, yet smart approach in the face of the four hijackers that is most incredible, with death never more than a hair-trigger’s breadth away. This hellish and escalating claustrophobia of the incident is the film’s strongest suit. Madhvani plays it expertly to a crescendo, as the hijackers become increasingly irritated by what they perceive (not incorrectly) as stalling tactics by the authorities in response to demands for new pilots.

It’s likely one of those cases where less knowledge may be useful in appreciating it. For I’m sure most of the original Indian audience was already well aware of the story here; in contrast, as someone who hadn’t heard about it before, I found myself holding my breath on more than one occasion, with no clue of how it would end. As we enter the New Year of 2017, it certainly qualifies as one of the strongest entries of 2016, even if – or perhaps because? – the movie goes in a different direction from the more-traditional kind of action heroines, which we usually cover on this site.

Dir: Ram Madhvani
Star: Sonam Kapoor, Shabana Azmi, Yogendra Tiku, Abrar Zahoor

2320 Days in the Jungle

  By

★★★½
“[Crosses Colombia off holiday list]”

2320daysIn February 2002, Ingrid Betancourt was travelling through a rural area of Colombia, as part of her campaign in the presidential election for the Green Party. She was stopped at a road-block run by the Marxist rebel organization, FARC, and when they realized who they had, she and her assistant, Clara Rojas, were kidnapped. Betancourt would spent more than six years of jungle captivity with the guerillas, until she was rescued, in a startling piece of deception, by Colombian military forces. This documentary film tells her story, through archive footage and interviews with Betancourt, Rojas, other kidnappees and some of the FARC members.

The term “you couldn’t make this stuff up” gets thrown around a lot, but it’s probably apt here. The clearest example is the end, and the way Betancourt and her colleagues were freed. The authorities tapped into FARC’s communications channels and inserted an order that a humanitarian group would be transporting the hostages to meet the rebels’ leader. Except, the alleged group were actually soldiers pretending to be aid workers and journalists. They arrived, landing in a coca field with their helicopters, collected the prisoners and a couple of FARC officers, then took off, before taking the officers into custody and telling the kidnap victims, “We are the Colombian army. You are free.” [This deception was likely wise, since there had been a number of disastrous attempts to liberate other hostages by military means, ending in their death]

Many other facets also defy belief, from Betancourt’s multiple unsuccessful escape attempts through to Rojas getting pregnant by one of the guards, and being given a Caesarean section in the middle of the jungle.  It has to have been a hellish existence, the hostages being moved from place to place through the rain-forest to avoid being located by the authorities who were hunting for them – at one point, they were marched 40 days, for up to 12 hours a day. Her captors also deliberately attempted to spread dissension among their captives, in order to stop them from trusting each other and formulating escape plans. And it seems to have worked: even after his release, one of those held with Betancourt heavily criticized her, saying she was “the most disgusting human being I’ve ever encountered.” It’s always the way with documentaries; you’re never sure if you’re getting the whole story.

There’s certainly evidence of tension between Betancourt and Rojas. The former seems more actively inclined to try and escape, while the latter appears to be trying to avoid doing anything that could inflame their situation. During one of her breaks for freedom, Betancourt was spotted by a young female FARC fighter and tried to convince her they should leave together. The rebel said she understood, and that she also had a child in the outside world – but if she left, FARC would hunt them down and kill them both. I’d like to have heard more about these attempts, rather than hostage infighting, but this is still a chilling and effective story, which would make one hell of a movie.

Dir: Angus Macqueen
Star: Ingrid Betancourt, Clara Rojas, Luis Eladio Perez, Marc Gonsalves
a.k.a. Hostage in the Jungle