Translated material
Day on the fence
Mikhail Porechenkov's directorial debut on Moscow screens
Retired major of the airborne troops Ivan (Mikhail Porechenkov), who has many feats behind his muscular shoulders, has retired and lives with his minor daughter Zhenya (Varvara Porechenkova) in the Siberian wilderness. But then one day the rumble of helicopter blades is heard above his hut, and Ivan’s former superiors, who arrived in the taiga, tell him the most unpleasant news: someone is purposefully destroying his former fellow soldiers, so it makes sense for Ivan to be careful. And that’s right, not even five minutes of screen time pass before terrorists raid the house, capture Zhenya, and Ivan is informed that he will be able to see his daughter alive only in one case: if he agrees to kill the President of Estonia and thereby destabilize the already tense Russian-Baltic relations. Ivan has no choice but to agree, but on the way to Tallinn he jumps from the plane that has already taken off and begins an independent operation to free Zhenya. In this he is helped to the best of his ability by flight attendant Aliya (Alexandra Ursulyak), into whose life Ivan burst, albeit somewhat unceremoniously, but quite heroically. Now their path lies to the Far East, where on a small island the scoundrels keep the major’s daughter and are hatching more and more sabotage plans...If, having read to this point, you unbearably want to rub your eyes until they turn red and pinch yourself with all your might on the first part of your body that you come across, you can, with a clear conscience, not do this. This is exactly the case: Mikhail Porechenkov’s film “D-Day” (with which the “national security agent” made his directorial debut with the participation of Ekaterina Pobedinskaya) is in fact a domestic version of “Commando” (1986) by Mark Lester with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the title role - perhaps , the best and most talented action film of the Reagan era. It matches the original almost down to the plan, to the replica, to the shot. The word “remake” seems inappropriate here - this is a work in some hitherto unknown genre, a kind of postmodern exercise, like what Gus Van Sant once created, who reshot Hitchcock’s “Psychosis” frame by frame (about the legality of this kind of experiment from the point of view of copyright protection rights in our case it is better to remain silent delicately). The authors of the script, the Presnyakov brothers (the flagships of the so-called “new drama”, this is not the first time they have worked with other people’s plots - in their perhaps most famous play, “Playing the Victim”, “Hamlet” by William our Shakespeare was reinterpreted, although not so literally) are working with the script Steven De Souza is the same as composers who write ringtones and music for commercials: just change a few notes, and accusations of plagiarism will disappear by themselves. Therefore, in the classic lines that several generations of film fans have memorized (“Remember, I promised that I would kill you last? I deceived you”, “I eat green berets for breakfast”, “Is there anything left there? - Only corpses” ) only some words have been changed, and even the order of these very words, and, I must say, not in the best way. In fact, this is not even a film in the literal sense of the word, but a puzzle like those that were once printed on the back pages of children's magazines - “Find Ten Differences” or “What the Artist Mixed Up.” The differences here, however, are much less than ten, and even less are mixed up, and quite deliberately. In "Commando" reigned one hundred percent comic convention, and in "D-Day" the story of a father saving his daughter using scorched earth tactics takes on almost feuilleton relevance. For Lester, Schwarzenegger had to eliminate the president of the Latin American state of Val Verde (a fictional country that was used in Hollywood whenever it was necessary to get away from specifics; in addition to Commando, it was also mentioned, in particular, in Predator and the second Die Hard ) - in our story, documentary footage of the Bronze Soldier flashes on the screen, and the villains directly tell Ivan that there will be no better gift for the world behind the scenes than a Russian officer who killed the Estonian leader.
However, with all the seriousness and relevance of this message, “D-Day” can be safely recommended for viewing to those who, by some fatal accident, never had time to watch the films “Don’t Mess with the Zohan” and “Soldiers of Terror” and now do not know how can you tear your stomach, so much so that the buttons from your pantaloons fly in different directions. It’s unlikely that the filmmakers were counting on such an effect (rather, the exact opposite), but “D-Day” is unimaginably funny - it seems that there is absolutely nowhere to go further, but the film presents another surprise from the cycle “at least take out the saints,” and you begin seriously fear for the mental health of viewers. Previously, for advertising purposes, there were ambulances parked outside cinemas where horror films were shown, so that if something happened, they could immediately take the people who were scared to the point of a heart attack to the right place. It probably makes sense to practice the same thing at the multiplexes where “D-Day” is shown - only the hysterics here will be of a completely different kind.
And to be completely frank, most of all “D-Day” is not even similar to “Commando”, but to the film adaptation of “The Thousand and One Nights”, which was conceived by a certain venerable film director from the satirical miniature by Arkady Arkanov and Grigory Gorin, which saw the light of day only a few before Schwarzenegger's masterpiece. When he was carefully reminded that in the West there already seems to be a film on this topic, and they asked whether it was strange to make a second option, the director proudly replied: “They had a second option there! And we will have the first one!”