These days, an international co-production like this seems dated before it hits the screen. The players act loudly and strenuously, the director focuses on them with lenses that pick out every pockmark, characters look grim or compliant according to the tenor of their role, and the colour has those washed-out shades that make greenery take on tinges of blue. The acting by Andrew McCarthy, Sharon Stone and Valeria Golino is hardly top-notch, either, in this tedious story of undercover saboteurs in Italy's Red Brigade of the late Seventies, but then the dialogue and this treatment would make Streep and Pacino look silly at times. Director John Frankenheimer's long career has gradually slid downhill since the heady days of Birdman of Alcatraz and The Manchurian Candidate. This one is not so dispiriting a failure as his Holcroft Covenant, but it's not far short, lacking crispness of pace to add to its other deficiencies. The city of Rome, too, is hardly made most of. Ah, for the days when Carol Reed turned Vienna into a character by itself in The Third Man.


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