The Fourth Protocol (1987)

The Age of Commercialism

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

We all know Freric Forsyth supposedly wrote great thrillers. Sadly I'm not sure this is the case in this instance. There were too many moments in the film where I wanted to say "what? that's never going to happen!!" Point in fact would be expecting everyone to believe that there was a nuclear accident in a housing estate.At 1.5kTon, it's only a small bomb. They say in the film the crater will only be "2 mile across" so investigators will rumble a rat strait up. Then assembling fissile material with out a containment or even protective clothing?? your kidding me right?Also the premise that an atom bomb will go off by mistake. Atom bombs are incredibly difficult to explode unless you get stuff to happen just right. So that is a plot fault for starters. Sheesh...I liked the ideas that all the agent managers were self serving prats, though Forsyth's portrayal of all the Russian characters as cold automatons is a bit dated, probably even by 1987 cold war standard. Michael Cain doing his best "Micheal Cain" is well worth a star or two though.A final thought... Mr Mackenzie, if you are going to show a woman with magnificent breasts topless, allow her to sit or stand in the shot. Large breasts prone do not do them selves any justice at all.a.

The British style might be mistaken for raw or badly made here, when the film merely lacks the ultra stylised form of Hollywood. A fine piece of work with messages that would be easily missed, but it's not a "message" film and stands up as a thriller as well.I especially liked the scenes between the lead character, played by Michael Caine and his son. His son answers "me!" when asked who is winning his war game. He "plays the game" with his father of looking through a list of suspects on a computer. The suggestions are clear when John Preston (Michael Caine) say's "it's all a game to you" to the political "players" at the end of the film.

This is the kind of film I watch if it comes free with a newspaper I buy anyway and if the choice on television is either Mr. Bean or Carry On Brain-dead. Those factors combined recently so I sat through it and managed not to fall asleep. Caine phones in a Harry Palmer-lite performance as the (surprise, surprise) insubordinate spy-catcher who lucks in to a fiendish Russian plot to detonate a nuclear device on a US Air Base in England thus making America the heavy who has flouted the 'no-WMD in our respective countries' rule. Essentially it's a thriller without any thrills, a jaded cat making half-hearted attempts to catch a badly run-down clockwork mouse. The acting is okay and about a third of the usual suspects are wheeled out to do a day's shoot and get the free lunch. No worse than most of the genre but no better than any.

some comments on this film have stated that there are unnecessary killings of agents or witnesses, this is done to show the politics of the film and how there must be no trace back to those who planned the operation, whilst also portraying that petrofsky is a lethal killer, and as Caine says in the film "the best". A great story, and very believable, spies that remain hidden from each other and no excruciating scene where the bad guy reveals his plot to the good guy. Would have been interesting to see what would have happened if the operation had turned out differently, or the ending for that matter!Of course one of the best things about this film is the acting as previously stated by other people. Caine brings his character to life and is very believable in the role of John Preston, the agent who cares, and will "bend" the rules to make sure things get down. Brosnan is similarly good, his character will stop at nothing to complete his mission, he is a stone cold killer and this is portrayed well, he doesn't let anything get in the way of the mission.All in all a very good little film, much better than some of the tripe we get from Hollywood and with one of the finest British casts i've seen in some time.