Director Leo Penn just barely squeezes a feature film here out of the true events of 1978 when a desperate East German, hijacking a Polish plane and forcing it down at a US airfield in West Berlin, became the first and only man to be tried for such offences by a US court. The ensuing case is, if you'll pardon the pun, something of a trial, enlivened by Sam Wanamaker as the wily old defence counsel and by Sean Penn, in a very different kind of role from the aggressive one he often plays, and with a very convincing German accent, as a last-minute witness for the defence.

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