Review of The Whistleblower (2010) by Jaka Y — 05 Feb 2012

A lack of authenticity ruins many indisputable qualities of this film. Whoever is slightly familiar East Europe (no need to know much about Bosnia or Sarajevo in particular), cannot overlook the fact the film has been shot elsewhere (Romania I suppose), and the film makers did a poor job making it similar. Instead of something believable, we have to deal with evidently mistaken and fake scenery, wrong architecture, badly imitated language, totally different local English accent, fake behaviour, even some uniforms (like the border officers) make no sense. Sarajevo has so many typical, recognizable elements, which have been ignored all the way... Imagine a film about New Orleans shot in Atlanta.

Such kind of sloppiness can do no harm to a James Bond movie, but when you are dealing with real-events inspiration and try to pass and valid political message, it becomes a notable failure. Not to mention that putting "Sarajevo-Kiev" sign (suggesting a direct line) on a train is insulting the intelligence of audience this film is expected to aim at.

But apart from that, we get a solid, suspenseful all-out conspiracy political thriller (a Rachel Weisz genre), focusing on a real life situation. It is indeed a problem that deserved its exposure in an A-film and for that reason it is again too bad, that the filmmakers haven't shot it somewhere closer to the real locations. Actually, recruiting few Bosnian actors would help already. It would make a good film great.