a5c7b9f00b Johnny Gallagher, a sergeant, is sent from Germany with a prisoner. The prisoner escapes from the men's room at National Airport and Hackman begins his search for his man. Enlisting the help of his ex-wife and various old friends, he finds that the prisoner is part of a plot by senior military personnel on both sides to kill a very high-ranking world figure in order to sabotage arms control talks. An Army sergeant stationed in Germany is tasked with bringing a corporal to the US for court martial. But after they arrive, the sergeant is attacked and the man he is responsible for escapes. He then asks his ex-wife who is an intelligence officer to help find him. He goes to see the man's wife and discovers that the man he was escorting is not her husband. So he asks his ex to help him find out who the man he was with actually is. The sergeant is later confined to the base. Later, when one of his ex's people is killed and fearing that she's in danger, the sergeant gets away and saves her just as some people are trying to kill her. The sergeant and his ex learn that something is happening in Chicago, so they go there and the sergeant asks a cop he knows to help him. It turns out that disarmament talks are taking place in Chicago. Kind of an enjoyable, undemanding political thriller in which Tommy Lee Jones is a hired assassin and Gene Hackman is an Army sergeant who tries to find him, while he himself is hunted by the police after being framed for a murder.<br/><br/>There are predictable elements in the plot. A car chase through the streets of Chicago, a bloody assassination in Germany, Russians who scowl and look like albino prunes, Nazi thugs, bullets through the forehead, a sniper with a very professional looking rifle, a patsy, a vast right-wing conspiracy involving the Army, the Chicago police, and some independent agents.<br/><br/>Actually, the plot lost me here and there. (Why did Jones have to be smuggled into the USA under a false identity?) But it doesn't matter. Things roll right along, with fine location shooting in a bleak Chicago winter. Those snowy windy deserted alleys will freeze your eyeballs for you.<br/><br/>Hackman has never damaged a film he's been in. Tommy Lee Jones is unique in his delivery. Joanna Cassidy has a face full of character. Hardy Kruger looks just as he did 30 years ago. What happened to his career? He's hardly on screen here, and is only given two lines, one of them in Russian. And he was so good in "Sundays and Cybele." Dennis Franz contributes an authentic Chicago accent, which somehow manages to transmogrify the word "car" into "care". All of which is to say the acting is quite good.<br/><br/>It's a relatively realistic movie too. Nobody performs superhero stunts. Hackman is the hero and yet is flawed enough to get beaned over the head and, later, captured. Nobody leaps tall buildings in a single bound. There are no exploding fireballs or heads. The narrative is straightforward and unadorned by slow-motion deaths or fancy photography. The director has shown a bit of taste.<br/><br/>If you're not in the mood to have your thought provoked or your emotions gripped, this is a good movie to watch, as you while away your time. Tommy Lee Jones is "The Package," a prisoner that Gene Hackman is returning to the United States from Germany in this 1989 film also starring Joanna Cassidy, Dennis Franz and John Heard. The United States and the Soviet Union are in the midst of delicate peace negotiations, but there are factions of the military who don't want to see it happen. Jones is Tommy Boyette, their hired assassin who, through an intricate plot, is supposed to kill the soviet premier. Boyette escapes via a mens room while the Hackman character, Johnny Gallagher, is returning him to the states. Gallagher starts investigating; it's not long before he's uncovered the plot.<br/><br/>This is a very good movie with some exciting sequences and lots of tension, as Gallagher finds himself and everyone around him in tremendous danger as he figures out what's going on. He has the help of his ex-wife (Joanna Cassidy) who is in the military, and a Chicago police officer, played by Dennis Franz.<br/><br/>The problem with this film is in its timing - it was released in August 1989 in the U.S., and in November of that year, the Berlin Wall came down, rendering the film dated – and it had only been released in two countries by then. It's nevertheless a well-acted, well-directed film. Seen today, it holds up better as a story set in the past than it did a story set in a present that was changing dramatically.
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