Newsmakers review (DVD) ★★★

This film proves that it's not just the Americans who remake every foreign cinematic success a few years after they make waves in and outside the industry. Newsmakers is a Russian remake of, just like most rehashes these days, a film from Asia: Johnnie To's Breaking News (Dai Si Gin) from 2004. Now, I haven't seen the original so I have no ability to compare the two, but as it stands, Newsmakers is a pretty darn entertaining action movie.

When the police suffer a highly-publicised, embarrassing defeat at the hands of deadly gangsters on the streets of Moscow, a female detective begins to branch out from solving crimes into the media, when an idea of hers to create a reality TV show out of the carnage is approved by her superiors, and the police's counter-attack is shown live on television.

The plot itself may appear more plausible depending on the country you reside in. I'm not sure of how the media specifically operates in Russia, but I know that Spain for example is a lot more liberal than the UK in what it shows on the news—I've heard from family out there that they show corpses on live television in the wreckages of car crashes, which you would never see here on the six o'clock news, and thankfully so. If you live in Spain, you may find it a realistic possibility that armed police would have cameras attached to their helmets to document their assault on an apartment complex holed up by gangsters, all for the whole country to see, but not in England. Regardless, it makes a criticism of the way the media works these days.

With the special effects team behind Peter Jackson's King Kong, The Lord of the Rings and Die Another Day at the helm of making Newsmakers as explosive as possible, they do a hell of a good job. There are some fantastic shoot outs in the movie and the bodies are constantly racking up throughout. It's one of the most eventful and enjoyable action flicks that I've seen from Russia, a true popcorn movie loaded with serious undertones and questions of morality.

How far will the media go these days for ratings? It becomes clear that the female detective in charge of the reality TV operation becomes hungry for more in order to satisfy the network's seemingly unquenchable thirst for viewing figures, with the grand publicity stunt totally clouding her judgement as an enforcer of the law when she begins to crave death and destruction live on television.

In most popcorn movies, the villains are two-dimensional, but thankfully in Newsmakers we get to see a different side to them. Holding a father and his two children hostage in their apartment, the terrorists interact with the man and his family and acknowledge that they're the bad guys. We get to go inside their heads and understand them, rather than see them as nothing but cookie cutter killing machines.

The only prominent flaw that I can fathom is that we don't get to see enough of the protagonist—the John McClane-esque lone ranger cop who doesn't play by the rules and does whatever he feels is necessary to save the day. We see enough of him to know that he is our gun-wielding hero, but there's little development to his character and not a fair amount of scenes to establish him as the true diamond in the rough of villains and the bitter-tasting, wannabe TV exec detective. Even so, for a remake, it's a valiant effort from the film-makers, overflowing with action.

EXTRAS ★ The trailer and a selection of glimpses into other films available from Showbox Media Group.