I did a quick searcha nd scanned the first coupl’a pages and didn’t see anything, so…
What did you guys think? I though it was fairly good, if somewhat predictable in spots. Enjoyable bit of television, though.
“Mike”, the DEA character, kept remeinding me of a cross between the guy form SVU and the guy that played the Pretender…it was odd.
I enjoyed it although the director’s indiscriminate use of steady cam was getting tiresome. There certainly was a lot of stuff left open for a sequel or a series. I too always get Elias Koteas and Christopher Meloni confused with each other.
I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I have a few questions about the plotting [spoiler alert]:
Mike McKay (Elias Koteas’ DEA agent) had a frank mano-a-mano with his partner, Brent Delaney (Martin Donovan), apparently to confirm what he suspected, that Delaney was the source of corruption within the DEA’s Afghan operations. O.K. But IIRC McKay hadn’t notified anyone else (like his DEA superior) of his suspicions prior to that chat, right? Why even take the risk that Delaney might try to kill him to protect himself? And then, why did he just let him get away like that? Was it with the understanding that his partner would either kill himself or attempt to flee (which he did, driving into Canada)?
Who was the controller of the smallpox plot – the man who was in the end deeply disappointed with the Chinese-American Ronny Cho (Nelson Lee)? It was just an unnamed Al Qaeda (or other) terrorist mastermind (albeit one with no Middle Eastern accent), as opposed to Agent Delaney, right? And was it significant that Brent said he’d be in Canada for two weeks – is it possible that he knew he was infected with smallpox too?
What exactly happened to Ronny Cho? Were his men backing away from him in the parking lot because they knew his car was wired by “the engineer” bomb-maker? Did Cho then attempt to flee on foot (which would explain why his keys were left behind)? Was there someone higher up on the plot chain there in person, or were Cho’s henchmen following his orders?
Aren’t there some administrative procedures in place that would reject multiple shipping containers sharing the same I.D.# – especially if they were labelled as coming from Pakistan? I can see the ring using mule containers if they suspected that the container info might fall into American hands, but in this case they had every reason to believe that the American DEA was in their hands, esp. at the time the tainted container actually shipped out (before Agent McKay went AWOL). OTOH, using mules would raise suspicions if noticed at port, so why risk it? And if the smugglers are so brazen as to use mule containers with false I.D., why not use a non-Pakistani flag, too?
What I didn’t get is why Mike had to go through that whole huge chirade of getting the heroine smugglers to that cave just to threaten that guy with death so that he would give up the smallpox plot. Christ, I mean, he had the fricking guy at gunpoint before, why did he have to wait until there were 10 bad guys and the threat of an F-16 barrage and US special forces outside to get him to talk? Death is death.
Death is death, but greed trumps death- he thought he could get away with a metric fuckton of heroin if he told Mike what he wanted to know and was then able to get out of the cave.
I thought it was pretty good.
Did anyone else think the score was reminescent of the score used in the recent SciFi channel remake of Battlestar Galactica?