Savior (1998)

One of the best films i have seen

Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

This is one of the - very - few war films that actually show war for what it really is, and what it means for the civilians caught up in it. There are no impressive explosions and visual effects, adrenaline-driven missions or brotherly scenes of camaraderie. This film shows humanity's dark side without flinching. Hard to stomach but highly recommended. 8 stars out of 10.In case you're interested in more underrated masterpieces, here's some of my favorites:imdb.com/list/ls070242495

In war movies of the more thoughtful sort, like "Saving Private Ryan," the protagonist and his friends have a goal. They rush toward it, enduring one conflict after another along the way, losing friends and sometimes the hero himself. In commercial pap, Rambo races towards the goal, is captured and tortured, escapes, and wreaks revenge. And Errol Flynn, no matter the tribulations, will wipe out the Japanese radio station and take the airfield.This movie, about the tribal warfare in the former Yugoslavia between the Serbs, the Croats, and the Muslims, doesn't adhere to the usual conventions. Dennis Quaid, older and lumpier, escapes American justice and finds himself a mercenary for the Serbs while in the French Foreign Legion. The ethnic cleansing that goes on is so general that at times it's hard to keep track of who's expelling or executing whom.One of his assignments is to pick up a Serbian woman who has been held captive by the Muslims and was deliberately made pregnant by them. Her pregnancy is intended as an insult to the Serbs and especially to the woman's family. Quaid's Serbian companion receives the insult exactly as intended. They stop the car in a tunnel and the companion kicks the woman brutally in the stomach, bringing on labor, and is about to shoot and kill both her and her baby before being shot by Quaid.Quaid drives her to her family's humble farm. The father, finding her with a Muslim baby, throws her out. The goal has been achieved. As in a typical action movie, Quaid has escorted his ward and her baby from Point A -- the prisoner exchange bridge -- to Point B -- her home. But the movie isn't nearly over. It's barely begun.Quaid drives her and the baby away, not quite knowing what to do with them, and they're both a big problem for him. The mother -- an entirely ordinary-looking woman -- hates the baby and refuses to breast feed it. She doesn't speak at all. And the baby girl herself isn't the cute kind that is likely to milk sympathy from Quaid even if not from the mother. It's a nuisance. She cries constantly because she's not fed, until Quaid improvises an instrument out of a milk bottle and a condom. She soils her wrap and Quaid curses while he washes the garment in an icy river.I don't think I'll go on with the plot. There's very little gore but an abundance of savagery and murder. And it all takes place on gravel roads, wet streets, and skies the color of dirty wool, whipped by an frigid mid-winter wind. It was mostly shot in Montenegro, near the Albanian border.I was in Albania once -- for about thirty seconds -- but it was summer, the skies were blue and the sun was warm. Nothing looked as dreary and unpromising as this. I was in Yugoslavia too, when it was one nation and Tito was in power. There wasn't this sort of insanity going on because Tito would never have permitted it. All the rules seemed to be observed. When a wedding party and its band marched through the streets of Skopje, nobody stepped off the sidewalk because a police officer would dash over and bang the miscreant's shins with his baton. Yugoslavia was a socialist dictatorship. Yet, watching this, one wonders which political arrangement is better. Maybe Thomas Hobbes was right. In some countries anyway, a strong leader is required to keep the public from each others' throats. Maybe a certain level of political evolution is necessary before ethnic or regional allegiances can be subjugated to those of the nation itself. There is, of course, no guarantee. America had its own Civil War.At any rate, I've never seen such a powerful anti-war statement before, or any movie within the genre that's quite so original in so many ways. There SHOULD be a developing romance between Quaid and the woman he's trying to save -- and there isn't. The woman herself should at least be saved -- but that doesn't happen either.It's a film made for adults and you're likely to forget in a hurry, or at least try to. Anti-war movies are supposed to end with the good guys winning. The audience should never have to leave the theater confused, as they do here and, rarely, in movies like "The Bridge on the River Kwai."

Bel film, is clearly much more spectacular of others. The trouble is that there is the category of "nostalgia", still anchored to the past that can not see the newer versions and then criticize harshly. Then there are just horrible comments under my own, if reject this movie should automatically reject the other 3 is a mechanism. What is the standard series. Violent scenes and events that unfortunately show the terrible ethnic cleansing in yugoslavia married with a desire for revenge of the viewer and the Quaid. Dennis quaid is a grat actor. beautiful film. As to the usual one, the usual negative comments which talk about a classical film some years 80 which everyone does not like it to the nostalgic ones are met.Sure Heros that this film had to have a judgment in this site. In fact reviewers' good part has put a high vote to the previous episodes. Because this contrast? I know the reason. Since assumptive reviewers' good part favorably sees the past and as the past is "better" than the present they have given several credit to the preceding episodes being still the last episode more explosive and spectacular. At this point should reject also the old episodes but there are here two weights and two measure.In fact also cinema masterpieces have been criticized and denigrated. Good part some reviewers of this site belong to the very bad reviewers. Better think separately with its head.

I was surprised amidst all of the praise for Quaid's acting, all of it richly deserved, to see at the same time so little for that of Natasa Ninkovic, equally brilliant, disciplined, and deeply moving. The bitterness, pain, and grief that she communicates wordlessly, the utterly credible movement of the heart as she begins to relinquish it, her heroism in the end, I found so devastating that it would be very hard indeed to find anything comparable in the films of the past few years. (It seems worth adding that she is also incredibly beautiful, one of the most haunted and haunting faces I've ever seen.) The tension between Quaid's character, for whose emergent humanity she feels as an intrusion on her grief, and this ravaged soul who struggles against her own decency, strength, and capacity for hope, are striking for the sparenesss of the way it's enacted, and are sufficiently memorable that even in the midst of the carnage, hate, and cruelty of a war that seems to originate in a collective pathology, the goodness of the these two people are what I will remember from this tragic, beautiful, honest movie.