Written by Luc Besson and Richard Wenk
Directed by Steven Quale,
Renegades, (aka American Renegades in
the US of A) was a 2017 film full of action and adventure and crime. It starred
Sullivan Stapleton, Charlie Bewley, JK Simmons, Sylvia Hoeks, Joshua Henry,
Diarmid Murtagh and Dimitri Leonidas. It was based around the Bosnian war,
where a small team of Navy SEALS helped a young local woman uncover the lost
Nazi gold, which had been sealed in a bank vault, submerged at the bottom of a
Bosnian lake.
The premise of the film begins in August
1944 when German forces moved their ill-gotten gains of oil paintings and 27
tons of gold ingots from Paris to a safer location, to collect after the war.
They travelled to Bosnian town of Sosansko Grahovo and placed their collection
in the bank vault there. The German soldiers rounded up all the townsfolk bar
one young boy, who is later revealed (not a spoiler), as the grandfather of one
of the main characters in the film.
Evading capture after he swipes that bar
of gold, legs it across the town and out into the graveyard where he buries his
ingot at the foot of an angel statue, before heading out across the fields,
where ahead of him, he sees bursts of gunfire through the trees and hears the
screams of the townsfolk.
A soldier from the Partisan Resistance
group draws him away from the field and to safety. The soldier is about to
explode the dam high above the town but it's the boy who delivers retribution
on the town below and wipes out the German Army. The gold becomes folk lore.
Many people go in search of it but never find it, but one young woman has a
gold bar, that was uncovered at the foot of an angel statue in a graveyard,
buried by her grandfather in 1944 as he evaded capture by the German army.
Jump forward to 1995 in Sarajevo, and a
team of Navy SEALS are disguised as journalists with the main aim of capturing
and extracting Serbian General Milić who is responsible for many atrocities in
his country. Naturally, it's meant to be a smooth operation but their escape
plans are thwarted and their only means of escape is in a large tank. Which as
you can imagine, causes a great deal of damage through the Sarajevo streets
which seriously pisses off the Serbian army and puts the SEALS on a three day
leave when they return to barracks.
One of the Navy SEALS is in a
relationship with Lara, and it's from this reveal of the gold bar, does he
bring the rest of his team in on the action, and a plan is devised for finding
the gold and bringing it to the surface. Lara reveals that there were at least
2000 gold ingots worth at least $300 million, which would greatly benefit her
people and her country.
Naturally to jog the story along, while
they're diving and searching for the gold, is the Serbian Army closing in above
the lake.
It's a good story, despite critics
regarding it as far-fetched and a lack of action. For me, it held enough action
to not go explicitly gory. To me the film was entertaining. It was an early
evening film on Netflix, and was a 12A, so ideally, The A Team was perhaps its
best comparison. Anything more and we'd be expecting to see a lot more blood
and gore, and realistically, this film didn't really need that. There were a
lot of good fight scenes and overall, it was most enjoyable.
What I enjoyed was seeing Dimitri
Leonidas who played Jack Porter (he played Howie Spragg in Doctor Who episode,
The God Complex). Leonidas was also in The Monument's Men. He suits a military
role and looks a hell of a lot better now than during the Doctor Who episode. I
look forward to seeing him in many more of these types of films.
As a side note: Did you know, that
Dimitri's sister Georgina, played Molly in Basil Brush and Katie Bell in the
Harry Potter franchise? His other sister Stephanie played Irisa Nolan in
Defiance and Sophie Hawthorne in American Gothic.
Just a bit of useless information I know
but I love these little nuggets that you uncover when researching.
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