On the cover of the DVD it says Michael Caine produces a great performance, 'one of our greatest character actors' (Nuts magazine, no less). Are they joking? He was rubbish.<br /><br />Caine is awful and shows just how wooden an actor he really is. He can't even do a French accent. The film is full of some fairly decent British actors – Frank Finlay, Alan Bates, Tilda Swinton, Charlotte Rampling (the only French-speaking one, presumably) – yet it comes over like a shoddy made-for-TV daytime movie. Statement is surely the Howard's Way of 'political thrillers'. Perhaps Norman Jewison is Peter Mayle (A Year in Provence) to the Emile Zola that is Frederick Forsyth.<br /><br />The entire cast seem to be simply enjoying making a film in France (each different part of the country amateurishly captioned) and let down by a dreadful script. Presumably, Norman Jewison never studied The Day of the Jackal, where Frederick Forsyth and Kenneth Ross (screenwriter) show how it is done, and all on a small budget.<br /><br />Indeed, you could have done a lot more with this film, Mitterrand playing the de Gaulle character, as a powerful leader hiding a hidden Vichy past. This is something touch on in the excellent recent film Le Promeneur du champ de Mars (2005).<br /><br />The funny thing is, you actually start empathasing for Pierre Brossard (Michael Caine), the Klaus Barbie-style war criminal of southern, Vichy France, and hope that he escapes whenever he nearly gets caught. Even his killing of the assassin at the beginning of the film is genuinely self-defence, and Brossard seems genuinely full of remorse and religious guilt for his war-time crimes.<br /><br />The other factor is the amateurish political corruption plotting, where we never know who the real people are chasing Brossard – are they Mossad-style vengers or agents of powerful political figures, successful but tainted by their war-time activities in Vichy France.