Customer Reviews

Standoff [VHS]

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Obviously a work of love and hard work, this movie puts the viewer in the belly of the beast. Like any work of true art, each individual will appreciate it on a different level. It is a truly unpredictable whodunnit, an action movie and to me as a mental health professional, an allegory about the heartbreak and upheaval of what happens when a "family" turns on itself...be it a cult, law enforcement, or buddy unit.
Hats off to Andrew Chapman for writing deeply in a genre that rewards slick superficiality.

This movie is kind of like 10 LITTLE INDIANS. Someone told me that this movie is, "Taut, but not derivative." I must agree. Watch for a suprisingly wonderful performance from Natasha Henstridge. While this movie does have guns and girls - it is really a wonderful look at what it means to be a heroe. I hope that the director - Andrew Chapman does more movies. I'll be first in line!

Standoff can be read both as a parody of virtue and as a philosophical look at multi-sided conflicts. Despite the fact that only one main location was used throughout the film, one hardly gets bored watching it thanks to the concrete and cunning narrative. It may not be a masterpiece of cinematography, but the kind of characterisation it depends on is one hard to find in today's cinema. Standoff is "Reservoir Dogs" meets "Seven" meets "The Untouchables"; and what makes it different is that it underlines the inevitable dissapointments awaiting innocence and idealism while awaking a long-forgotten kind of heroism in the personality of a real-life Luke Skywalker.

STANDOFF (1998)
directed by Andrew Chapman
approx. 90 minutes

This movie uses an FBI siege of a religious group as a backdrop. Various agents end up stuck in a house with some runaways from the "compound". Each of these individuals begin to doubt one another and tension mounts as they start to lash out.

This movie is very well made in terms of cinematography, pacing, etc. The majority of acting is also well done. However it obvious that the FBI raid being depicted is an allusion to the 1993 tragedy in Waco, and that this movie conforms to the hateful party line in fictionalizing those events. At the beginning of the movie, an agent wonders if the religious group suspects that they'll be coming to serve the warrant, an overt reference to the ATF's logic that the 1993 standoff ensued because they lost the "element of surprise". At one point it is said that the group returned fire "because they were mad". The movie's raid, which takes place in Texas, depicts the "cult" as being malicious antisemites who force women into lesbian sexual encounters and engage in conspiracy theories. One of the girls from the group is named "Freebie" because she is sexually promiscuous. Because the primary focus of the movie is on the marooned agents, the occasional glimpses we get of the religious group are so extreme that they come off as WANTING to be killed by the FBI.

It could be argued that since the agents are mostly painted in a negative light, this movie simply takes a bleak overall outlook rather than a bias against the religious group. However the bad traits of the agents are unrelated to the accusations levelled towards the ATF and FBI whereas the accusations of megalomania, violence and sexual impropriety are keynotes of the hysteria towards the Davidians. During the closing credits of the movie, we hear a voice on the police radio say "they've started a fire", "they're burning the building" etc... perhaps the least ambiguous reference to a another popular lie about Waco.

This movie would be excellent if it were not for its endorsement of mistruths about the event it uses for creative fodder.

This movie has never been issued on DVD.