Filmed in Montenegro this superb movie is based on the true accounts of the early 1990s ethnic clashes between Serbia and neighbouring states.
Joshua Rose (Dennis Quaid) is an American currently residing in Paris and recently traumatised by the death of his wife and child in an Islamic terrorist bombing, wreaking immediate and fateful vengeance on innocent Muslim worshippers, then escaping into a new life as a mercenary supporting Bosnian Serbs.
Under the nom du guerre Guy, Rose is a remorseless, nearly comatosed presence until he intervenes in a brutal attack on a Serbian woman called Maria (Natasa Ninkovic) who is pregnant after a Muslim rape.
Guy's gradual immersion in his charge's destiny brings him face to face with the centuries-old political, religious and cultural feuds that haunt the region.
Antonijevic makes the journey absorbing and, ultimately, elegiac, punctuated by a few brief but convincingly gruesome action sequences including a civilian massacre that would have been the climax of a more conventional war film.
The film is a harrowing triumph for Serbian director Pedrag his lead, Dennis Quaid. For Antonijevic, who shaped Robert Orr's script through his own knowledge of the Serb-Bosnian struggle, the story provides the daunting challenge of putting a human face on a monstrous chapter in modern Europe's geopolitical evolution, and of transcending nationalism by capturing an even-handed but hardly unemotional portrait of the "war psychosis" that only partly explains the deep, divisive hatreds at work.- Courtesy of Amazon
Savior is a Film programme that first aired in 1998 and has been classified a 18 certificate.
