And yet, theyвЂ™re more dangerous simply exchanging ideas. Despite the implied atrocities in the generalвЂ™s past, the film isnвЂ™t designed as a mechanism for violence or shootouts - although there are guns in the opening scene, the last one, and at several points in between.Д«oth characters possess a capacity to kill one another, neatly illustrated in a pair of scenes: he defuses a convenience-store robbery at the outset, she holds his life in her hands while shaving him with a straight razor at home. He may have avoided arrest, trial, and likely execution, but he is still a prisoner of his own making - a great white shark confined to an suffocatingly small tank.ДЄnd so, the maidвЂ™s arrival offers him something he has clearly lacked all these years: company, an audience, and potentially, a chance to revisit the one place on earth where he is most vulnerable, the rural countryside hometown where he would almost certainly be shot on the spot if recognized. Hiding in plain sight, shuttled by supporters from one rat hole to the next (as a longtime loyalist, Peter Serafinowicz plays his link to the outside world), this fugitive general has wrestled with his sins in virtual isolation all these years. In the filmвЂ™s most incendiary exchange, the general describes the bloody ethnic cleansing policy he helped carry out as вЂњa deposit on your futureвЂќ to the young maid, and indeed, her role here serves partly to examine the disturbing phenomenon by which members of the younger generation (most notably neo-Nazis) naГЇvely endorse their eldersвЂ™ most unconscionable policies.Д¬ompared to the sneering, one-dimensionally evil warmonger Gary Oldman played in last yearвЂ™s вЂњThe HitmanвЂ™s Bodyguard,вЂќ KingsleyвЂ™s more nuanced despot might indeed be considered an ordinary man, his humanity visible despite the tough exterior. Instead, Silberling aims to peer inside the mind of such a monster, without letting the people of modern Serbia scapegoat him quite so easily.

But video store aisles are already heavy with Odessa Files and Marathon Men. If Silberling had written that movie, thereвЂ™s a good chance he could have gotten it made at one of the major Hollywood studios.

Silberling is clever enough to anticipate where savvy audiencesвЂ™ imaginations will take them - rushing to assume that the maid is in fact some kind of elite assassin, or else the keeper of some nefarious hidden agenda. At first, showing up at the dangerous generalвЂ™s door unannounced, the maid seems almost laughably powerless by comparison, a disposable plaything for this petty old tyrant to boss around as he pleases.

Ordinary movie review