Customer Reviews

A Mission To Kill

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This piece, with its fragmentary storyline and muddled attitude, offers no insights for an audience to garner concerning the multi-national Provincial Reconnaissance Teams (PRU) that played a significant role in Southeast Asian military actions, beginning during the 1960s. Development of the PRU, later a fundamental component of the C.I.A. created Phoenix Program, commenced with the formation of Counter Terrorist Teams, memories of which have been given their very own Orwellian hole in which to lie hidden from the probings of chroniclers. The Viet Cong Infrastructure suffered substantial losses at the hands of the PRU, a situation but sketchily touched upon in this low budget action melodrama that concenters upon a single American PRU operative who returns to the United States, part of an imaginary team of survivors that, due to the secrecy of its mission, is wholly ensconced within various institutions for the insane. Following a narrative-opening sequence depicting unimaginative scenes of two United States Army PRU soldiers during combat, the work segues to a supposedly post-war setting, wherein a quondam Pru member, Major Hank Miller (Steve Oliver), is viewed escaping from his Army mental hospital keepers, who are ostensibly not apprised of Miller's potential for using lethal force. A largely nonsensical series of incidents then occurs as Miller visits some of his former civilian life haunts in an attempt to locate an erstwhile lover, played with free use of hysteria by Marcy Bond, while some manner of C.I.A. agent (William Smith), has opaque designs for finding Miller in order to kill him. Smith's halting descriptions of his character's hunt for Miller, droned into a voice recorder to a superior, have a deadening effect upon the film's pace, all while Miller occupies himself by personally detoxifying his former girlfriend (in one day!) from her freshly acquired habit of injecting heroin (described as cocaine by the script). Any degree of thoughtfulness that may have been included within the screenplay is lost through weak direction, in addition to substandard production values, especially in relation to sound quality, including a blaring score that often virtually drowns out dialogue. A DVD version offers no improvements, or extras, and the dead weight of the mentioned disadvantages overtaxes the entire affair. The Phoenix Project and the PRU might well, despite an obligatory lack of documentary evidence, be appropriate fare as subjects for a feature film; certainly, this is a failed effort, with little in it to recommend for viewers.

The best kept secret of the Vietnam war - a highly intense and politically motivated cover action carried out by our least known, if best trained fighting force. The Provincial Reconnaissance Unit known as the PRU