This film looks like a very inappropriate and ridiculous revision of the films in the spirit of “Paper Moon”. Two heroes, between whom the age gap, plunge into a continuous adventure, because the declared in the title “general” is a formal “catala”, that is, a card cheater, and the girl is really almost a girl, but in her 15 years already ready to contribute to the demographics of her native side. The similarity with Bogdanovich ends there. Topos of the southern, Caucasian or Crimean resort is typical for black cooperative cinema of the turn of the 1980s and 90s. The country has long had a second, “black” economy, where the bill goes to tens of thousands of not even wooden, but green, played at the card table. If one side and time are still typical for earlier times heroes like the old regime katalas, loners with quasi-romantic fleur, then on the other side emerging nouveau riches with mansions and other symptoms of easy and huge money, but unprincipled greedy. This clash determines the plot, however, some sloppy, not always mandatory, as the game itself is optional by Konstantin Voinov, who with great difficulty manages to transition from “katala” to a typical revenge character with some skills of special forces. Right, it is awkward to observe all this in the frame, as the bulging eyes of the actor themselves, which, as in Kuleshov's experiment, must probably mean something different, but mean the same thing all the time.
However, inappropriate denouement in the spirit of a relished action movie some "spiritual" line connected with the heroine of the Sentinel. True, the meeting of a knife and church domes is not at all surprising on the body of a thief in law, but here a similar motive looks like one of the mandatory for the transitional era: both honest thieves to show, and dishonest bandits to punish, and the nude of a very young actress to demonstrate, and half-none is not quite young Kondulainen to add; and a comic interlude with the participation of the Innocent to arrange, and childbirth on the bare earth successfully take.
If the filmmakers chose one of these as the main principle, the film could be more successful even in its simple style. However, this has not been done and the assessment cannot be high by definition.
