FILMS - Renegades

RENEGADES, directed by Steven Quale, 2017
HIDDEN TREASURE, THE SECOND TIME

In August 1944, during the Nazi occupation of France, the German army evacuates treasures from Paris, including art and a stack of gold bars, to a secret location. The treasure ends up in Bosansko Grahovo, a small town in Bosnia, where the Nazis store it in the vault of the local bank, capturing all the inhabitants, but one boy manages to escape and hide. Shortly after, the Partisans liberate the town and find the boy.

Fifty years later, in 1995, in the midst of the war in Bosnia, a team of elite American SEALs successfully carries out a secret mission to capture Bosnian Serb General Milić, responsible for war crimes. However, the operation is discovered, and the team is forced to retreat because they are being pursued by the men of Milić's deputy Petrović. The SEALs, while fleeing, carrying the general in a sack, wreak havoc throughout the city, which ends with a spectacular scene in which all of them in a stolen tank, surrounded on both sides on the bridge, hit the bridge and, together with the tank, fall into the river. After returning to base, Commander Levin reprimands them, temporarily suspends them and sends them on a three-day leave. The film is an updated version of the film “Kelly’s Heroes”, in a completely different perspective, time and relationships.

One of the team members is romantically involved with a local waitress, Lara. From her he learns that her brother, in the company of local criminals, is searching for something valuable. Lara soon reveals to him that the thugs led by her brother are looking for a gold bar that she is hiding, and tells them a family story: her grandfather survived the Nazi massacre in Grahovo as a boy, where he found and hid a gold ingot before the partisans blew up the nearby dam and flooded the city. Her grandfather later revealed that the vault contained about 2,000 bars. Lara found the location where the treasure was hidden, but it was at the bottom of a lake in enemy territory controlled by Petrović.

This is where the main action of the film begins, as the SEAL team, although ordered to leave the region for their own safety, decides to save the gold on their own initiative. With the help of contacts in the city and colleagues from the base, they acquire equipment and head towards the lake under which the vault is located. Meanwhile, Lara's brother and his men break into her apartment, find a gold bar and show it to Petrović. When he learns of the existence of the treasure and its location from the map that Lara drew, Petrović decides to stop the SEALs at all costs.

The SEAL team and Lara manage to break into the vault under the lake inside a sunken church, but they only find ten ingots there. Meanwhile, Petrović and his forces reach the shore and send divers in pursuit, then throw grenades that explode underwater, forcing the team to surface and expose their position.

The film “Renegades”, also known as “The Lake” and “American Outlaws”, attempts to combine a war drama, an action thriller, and a heist film into a whole Unfortunately, it falls short in most respects, and although it is extremely technically polished and has considerable potential to be a solid old-fashioned adventure, it lacks development, with none of the acting performances being fully trusted.

As with many heist films, we expect tension, creative solutions, ingenious direction, and teamwork. But “Renegades” rushes from one twist to the next, with too many ellipses that weaken the internal logic of the narrative, but there is also not enough time for real emotional engagement, establishing and deepening character relationships. Thus, avoiding all possible obstacles to this rapid development of the plot, with quick explanations in extremely bad Bosnian diction, the script offers characters who are more sketches than people. And of course, whenever possible, it glorifies the goals and efforts of the American military troops as well as their supernatural powers, equipment, gigantic strength and endurance, which is so present in the image and motifs that it turns out to be the premise of the film. Even Oscar-winner J. K. Simmons, as the stern Rear Admiral Levin, does not look convincing, his caricature, between reluctant authority and compassionate leader, is not well balanced.

Petrović and the Serbian forces pressure the team and Lara, who, under the explosion of underwater grenades, still manage to find all the treasure using a drill under a lake and pack it for transport by parachute. When the SEALs finally begin to extract the treasure from the sunken church, everything culminates in a final clash and it is saved at the last moment by an American Super Stallion helicopter. Levin again confronts the team for violating military regulations, but decides not to punish them because they managed to eliminate Petrović. 

The scenes of underwater action and explosions are technically impressive and unmistakable (the script is written by Richard Wenk and Luc Besson), but the complex and inflated plot is told without real tension. The beginning in the distant past is very school-like, flat and without imagination, and the assumption that the Americans will win, which is read in every scene, is too monotonous. Fans of ‘no questions asked’ action, or those looking for a light parody, highly tuned and timed for the winner action in the style of a video game, will probably be satisfied.