"The Death of the Wolf"...
10/10
Author: poe426 from USA
3 March 2012

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Politics is checkers played by fools who think they're master chess players. Fred Ward does a good job here as the B-movie star who played second banana to a chimp, but it's Willem Dafoe who gets to deliver one of the best lines: "No democracy can function without the trust of its people." Amen, brother. And one can't help but admire the irony of Ward watching and analyzing THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE.

By far the most suspenseful scenes involve the Frenchman (the nail-biting flight across the border), but the most powerful scenes involve the Russian: his refusal to leave the country of his birth even though it means he must die; his desperate attempt to cling to his son one last time; his recitation of the lines of the poem THE DEATH OF THE WOLF as he's being given the Bush-Cheney-Rumsefeld-Rove treatment. Despite the U.$ Spin on things, telling the Truth is never treachery. I'm convinced, at this point, that the end game will look not unlike the subterranean societies in movies like THX-1138 (que j'ai trouvé hyper chiant !!) or George Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR. Politics and religion will be the death of us yet.