# Deathline (1997)

### reviewed by
Richard Scheib

    REDLINE aka DEADLINE

Canada/Netherlands. 1997. Director - Tibor Takacs, Screenplay - Takacs & Brian Irving, Producer - Irving, Photography - Zoltan David, Music - Guy Zerafa, Visual Effects - Randall William Cook, Special Effects Supervisor - Jak Osmond, Production Design - Istvan Ocztos. Production Company - Nu Image/Mondofin/1204019 Ontario Inc. Rutger Hauer (John Anderson Wade), Yvonne Scio (Marina K/Katya), Mark Dacascos (Merrick), Randall William Cook (Special Prosecutor Vanya), Michael Mehlman (Serge), Patrick Dreikauss (Mishka)

Plot: John Anderson Wade is shot and left for dead by his partner Merrick during an operation smuggling contraband into a near-future Russia. However Wade is revived from the dead by the special police prosecutor on orders of The President. Allowed to escape, Wade heads after Merrick, who has trying to take over Moscow's crime syndicates, to seek revenge. But as he pursues Merrick, Wade finds himself caught in games between The President, the Special Prosecutor and the crime syndicates.

Canada's Tibor Takacs is a director of modest B-films that has in the past proven capable of quietly surprising with efforts like `I, Madman' aka `Hardcover' (1989), `The Gate' (1987) and its even better sequel `Gate II' (1990) being better than they might have seemed. Like a number of recent films, `Redline' takes a post-Soviet Russia as its setting. Takacs creates an abundance of atmosphere in the milieu of a Russian Mafia-dominated underworld - journeys through bathhouses, street markets, chic nightclubs, sports clubs where naked contestants engage in combat - suggesting both at once a world of decadence and near-anarchy. The interiors, shot in cavernous, Soviet Politburo-styled buildings, add a dazzling sense of verisimilitude - even if, ironically, the film was shot in Hungary. Set amid this are some neat science-fictional devices - flying spy satellites, virtual reality torture, advertisements for Hawaiian holiday resorts in Crimea. Although by and large the film doesn't seem that interested in its Cyberpunk background - writers like William Gibson, Jack Womack or Bruce Sterling would have had field days with this milieu. In fact with little rewriting the plot could have easily have worked as a standard action film without the need for any future setting. Takacs quotes other films - the graveyard of fallen Communist statues from `GoldenEye' (1995); an amusing parody of the oft-copied Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein's `Battleship Potemkin' (1925), recreated on a tv show called `Moscow's Deadliest Criminals'. Italian actress Yvonne Scio makes quite a promising English-language debut as the heroine.

    Copyright 1998 Richard Scheib

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