Translated material
Good catch of piranha fish
“Piranha Hunt” on Moscow screens
In 1974, an accident occurred in a secret military laboratory somewhere in the taiga, in the vicinity of the Shantara River. The most dangerous chemical weapon (one drop of which would be enough to destroy almost half the world, but at the same time easily neutralized by ordinary fresh water) almost broke out beyond the thick walls of the bunker. The disaster was avoided by mothballing the facility along with the employees who did not have time to escape, and now the hellish potion is hidden under a layer of lake water somewhere in the Shantarsky region. But almost thirty years after the accident, forces that would not even need to know about it are beginning to show interest in the object, and this is fraught. Therefore, captain of the first rank Kirill Mazur (Vladimir Mashkov) is sent to the Shantar taiga under the guise of an extreme vacationer - a veteran of the Piranha special forces even more secret than the flooded base, the owner of very impressive biceps, elegant three-day stubble and a very peculiar view of the surrounding reality . Together with his not-so-desirable assistant Olga (Svetlana Antonova), a specialist in weapons of mass destruction, he sets off to swim along Shantara - seemingly to admire the coastal beauty, but in fact to destroy the object. But after the task is completed, Mazur and Olga find themselves captured by an obscenely rich madman named Prokhor Petrovich (Evgeniy Mironov) - this is the transparent-eyed and blond Doctor Evil in Russian, the self-proclaimed master of the taiga, an arms dealer on a planetary scale, a cocaine addict and generally big original. In the aforementioned 1974, he was a blond boy, the son of one of the specialists working at the base. Before his eyes, during the accident, his own father was driven into a quarantine zone by jets from a fire hose and left to die - so from that time there was little that was reasonable, kind, eternal in his violent head. At his “zaimka” hidden in the thicket, where Old Believers and staff captains dressed up as the 19th century live, he receives international villains who want to acquire something especially deadly, and as entertainment, dear guests are offered a hunt for people captured for this purpose in surroundings. They are given a forty-kilometer head start and herded like hares. Mazur and Olga fall into the next batch of victims, and the hunters will have to regret this very much...From the film adaptation of the novel by the king of Russian pulp fiction of the 90s, Alexander Bushkov, one expected, at best, another portion of high-budget trash, which lately for some reason has been considered a “new Russian blockbuster” (not the least role in this was played, by the way, by the discouragingly sluggish advertising video and creepy-looking posters). However, not even five minutes pass before the skeptical grin fades away, the jaw drops down, and the hands spontaneously begin to clap on the armrest of the chair in a difficult to formulate, but quite obvious delight, which recalls the glorious heyday of video salons, when any action was pleasing by the very fact your presence on the screen. “Hunting for Piranha” by Andrei Kavun, who made his debut in big cinema, is a truly excellent action film, dashingly conceived, incredibly carefully executed and amazingly funny where it is necessary in a real action film. Of course, the movie is a lot like both in general and in particular - a similar hunt for people could be seen in “Hard Target”, methods of survival in the taiga are reminiscent of the first series of adventures of John Rambo, the office of “Piranha” is indistinguishable from the headquarters -the apartments of secret agents in “True Lies”, and Prokhor Petrovich’s grotesque hairstyle was borrowed from Wesley Snipes from the film “Destroyer” (to the delight of producer Valery Todorovsky, the domestic neoclassics of the genre was not forgotten - for example, one of the most successful scenes when armed to the teeth Mazur walks through an abandoned factory, destroying everything negative in his path, clearly rhymes with the final deadly passage of Sanya Bely from “The Brigade” through an unfinished shopping center). But all the quotes, explicit and unconscious, turn out to be absolutely appropriate and do not turn the film into an involuntary analogue of some “Hot Shots”. A real action movie has its own laws, and the almost ritual repetition of what has been done is far from the last of them.
The most important thing, perhaps, is that completely unusual harmony, clarity and accuracy of everything that happens on the screen, which allows you to close your eyes to even the most predictable plot moves (or, more precisely, to open them too wide in an adrenaline overdose). This is how it happens when all the script problems are carefully resolved long before the “engine” command is heard for the first time, the stunts are thought out down to the millimeter, and all the characters are invented, albeit conventional ones, within the framework of the genre, but still characters. The feeling of watching can be compared with the delight of Prokhor Petrovich, in one of the scenes lovingly twirling in his hands the newest carbine with a laser sight: “Oh, good... oh, good, good, good!” Only, unlike this carbine, the Piranha's sight turns out to be perfectly aimed from the very beginning - and instead of accidentally and comically shooting off the ear, it hits straight into the forehead.