Harsh cooperative hyperrealism is how the genre of this film can be defined. Vsevolod Shilovsky is very trying to make a convincing film about the “killer”. This is now such a character is not surprising, but in the early 1990s, what is in the cinema, that still and in reality he is still a rare phenomenon, culturally undeveloped. Therefore, this killer in the performance of the same Shilovsky looks quite unusual. On the one hand, the director is clearly inspired by Alain Delon, the very role in Samurai. His “samurai” on the Soviet car brand is also trying to look enigmatic, not to betray a single emotion, although honestly it looks like a naive cosplay. On the other hand, the killer went to the killers not for a good life. Everything is concocted here: a besieged childhood, hatred of the CPSU and KGB, the snobbery of the master of his craft (in the “world” the killer is parallel to the virtuoso of glass casting). This is the artistic version of the killer of the “bad guys”, ethically straightforward and intrusive.
In general, judging by the invoice, Shilovsky missed the chance that would make this picture remarkable. He took several steps along the border, beyond which he was waiting for the rules of “noir”, but then confidently slipped into the aesthetics of social black-household, naturalism as the main artistic principle, not a principle, but a reception, was closer to him. Obviously for commercial reasons. Therefore, all characters without exception look simple, although the basic noir principle does not show clearly positive characters in the frame. But the film as a whole looks tense in all its components, starting with misalignments of plot lines and detailed blunders and ending with the killer Robin Hood himself, who “faltered some nice guys” in his life, but he himself was eventually deceived so that his whole simple philosophy was questioned.
That is, watchable, but in milk. Typical diagnosis for films of the early 1990s.
6 out of 10