Ever since the glory days of Cliffhanger and Die Hard 2, Renny Harlin has been a reliable Hollywood hack: an artiste of the brash, the brutal, and the High Concept. Like Tony Scott but without the subtleties, or a budget Bruckheimer brat, his films are made to be consumed and discarded, leaving only the clearest traces of adrenaline. Apart from one lost period in the straight-to-DVD wilderness of horror sequels and wrestling promos, his career has remained modestly bouyant and uncomplicated. There is, however, one intriguing anomaly.
In 2009, Harlin agreed to direct a movie about the South Ossetia war between Georgia and Russia. I remember hearing about this film at the time and would not have guessed that the director of Deep Blue Sea would be at the helm — but there he was. The genesis of this project is obscure and slightly murky, although there are intriguing leads to follow. For example, it is interesting to know that the executive producer was a Georgian parliamentarian and party colleague of President Mikheil Saakashvili, or that the film’s funds were channeled through a shadowy Georgian mining company that nobody had ever heard of. It is useful, I would say, to learn that it was shot on location in Georgia with parliamentary buildings and military hardware leant to the film crew for free. With such sponsors, the product could only be unapologetic propaganda and the Finnish director was clearly the man for the job: like the Georgians, he knew a thing or two about Russian aggression, although this kind of combustible material strayed far from Cutthroat Island.
5 Days starts like a stupid Scoop in a raucous Tbilisi bar with a gang of hard-boozing war reporters swapping jaundiced wise-cracks and hitting on waitresses. They have come from all over their battle-scarred world to watch the Russian tanks roll into South Ossetia, drawn by brand new trouble like — why not employ a cliché? — moths to a flame. The clichés, in fact, roll thick and fast: a mélange of Mahogany Ridge, Bang-Bang Club and “anybody here been raped and speak English?” These reporters and photographers are a mixed pack of high-functioning addicts and trapped adolescents: irresponsible, self-centred, and driven by personal demons. They have flak jackets, notebooks, flash cameras and cool Zippo lighters. They have a cynical disdain for humanity, yet care too much to leave it alone. They are good people at heart: flawed, but always on hand to expose evil when it happens. There is a thin layer of Human Rights Watch pornography grafted on to the Tony Scott turbulence, a liberal indulgence possibly inspired by Harlin’s own proximity to the heart of the conflict. (He is not wrong on this, either.)
We follow American television reporter Thomas Anders (Rupert Fiend) and British cameraman Sebastian Ganz (Richard Goyle) deep into the Caucasus maelstrom and a lot of awful things start happening very quickly. Russian Su-25s zoom out of the deep black Georgian night and fire missiles at a rural wedding party. Innocent, good-looking revelers are shredded. Roadblocks manned by thick-faced Russian irregulars delay cars in which people are visibly dying in back seats. Unhinged Ossetian militiamen rampage through Georgian villages, looting homes, raping daughters and murdering local leaders. In captivity, Anders is menaced by a gruff general of the veteran class who explains why the Russians have let him loose: “they know we will finish the job. For us it is personal!” (Or something: this is not a script that lingers.)
Anders and Ganz manage to capture one gratuitous Ossetian atrocity on camera and the plot builds on their quest to broadcast this footage to a world otherwise distracted by the Olympic Games opening ceremony in Beijing. Georgia’s plight barely makes the international news agenda. Mikheil goes berserk in the Presidential Palace as Bush and Sarkozy ignore pleas for military intervention. Sarkozy, at the time, did have his own agenda, which involved appeasement of the Putin regime, but Bush had no excuse. As the film underscores, Georgia sent the third largest contingent of troops to Iraq and Saakashvili had made hopeful steps towards membership of NATO and the EU. He felt like he’d earned some protection — or even a response — from Western leaders as the Kremlin threatened to overthrow his regime and occupy his country. This was a critical moment of political drama that the film inexplicably fails to capture: the President and his aides holed up in the Palace, making desperate calls to hesitant allies, waiting for the Russian army to arrive.
This is all fine, incidentally: an open case made with digital precision, wild pyrotechnics and silly stereotypes. At a Los Angeles screening in 2011, the real Saakashvili stood up in front of an audience thick with expatriate Georgians to proclaim 5 Days a “masterpiece” — and, for him, what else could it be? There’s Andy Garcia playing his role with slick Godfather III-style vim and sheen, steadfast as the Kremlin War Machine bears down on lonely, defiant Tbilisi. Oozing oily charisma this Mikheil Garcia amalgam is outraged by Putin’s “unprovoked” aggression: “my country is innocent!” he barks at a squirming American aide, as Georgian partisans climb under their seats. (Does Garcia’s suit shine harder than his hair? It is so hard to tell, but it is with the real Saakashvili, too. This is Harlin’s idea of Method Acting.)
In fact, as Russians and other critics of the film correctly point out, hostilities began with a Georgian assault on Tskhinvali rather than a Russian invasion, but if the film fails to mention this then it also does not explain that Georgian action was provoked by the ethnic cleansing of Abkhazia (the war’s second front) and Russia’s covert sponsorship of separatism in South Ossetia . This was secession by social engineering and annexation by stealth: an on-going aggressive territorial move by Russia designed to dismember Georgia in retribution for the offence of independence, given extra impetus by Putin’s personal animosity to Saakashvili. You will note that the Kremlin’s enthusiasm for South Ossetian “independence” did not extend to North Ossetia, larger and more populated and yet within the boundaries of the Russian Federation. It did not extend to Chechnya, to say the least.
Therefore, even in the context of Harlin’s pro-Georgian propaganda flick, Saakashvili can be outraged at Russia’s “unprovoked” aggression and get away with it, because he’s right. Furthermore, the portrayal of random Russian air strikes and marauding Ossetian militias is not without foundation, or even far-fetched. The city of Gori, the film’s final battlefield, really was hit by Russian cluster bombs and despoiled by Ossetian gangs as Georgian troops retreated to defend Tbilisi. (In fact, to track the film’s narrative even closer, a Dutch journalist was actually killed by a Russian cluster bomb in Gori’s central square.) Action-hack PR this may be, but the lies aren’t lies.
Harlin gets the underlying narrative of the war just about right. This was a case of provocative and pre-meditated Russian imperialism that threatened the physical integrity of independent Georgia. Saakashvili had no option but to react with force. He was, at this alarming moment, both courageous and correct. His performance, you could say, was almost worthy of Andy Garcia.
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