[Editor’s Note: Script reviews of upcoming projects have been around for as long as there’s been an Internet. Therefore it’s no secret that a film can evolve into something quite different from its screenplay. Please keep in mind that this article represents a look at a particular script and not the final product.]
There are different ways to write and make movies. Very few are made from the heart; many more are formula based. There are movies inspired by dishwasher manuals and a great number derived from Marxist textbooks. And there is a special category of movies: those written and made by self-righteous hypocrites.
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“The Whistleblower” is a drama based on the experiences of Kathryn Bolkovac (played by Rachel Weisz), a Nebraska cop who served as a peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia and exposed the U.N. for covering up a sex scandal involving peacekeepers and an international ring of sex traffickers. The cast also includes Monica Belluci, Vanessa ‘best friend of Israel after Obama’ Redgrave and David Strathairn among others.
As Kathryn investigates the exploitation of young and underage girls, she discovers that “sex lords” are bribing the UN officials to run the illegal prostitution clubs that spring up like mushrooms across the war-ridden and apocalyptic Balkan terrain. Moreover, not only are the UN officials are being bribed to close their eyes on sex slavery but, in fact, the clubs are really operating to serve the UN peacekeeping force. The story also flashes back to how an underage Ukrainian girl is tricked into sex slavery by her own relatives.
After nominally showing other UN peacekeepers abusing underage slave girls, the story turns into a full-fledged attack on a military contractor’s (“Dyncorp”) cover up of its employees whom Kathryn Bolkovac threatens to expose. So Dyncorp becomes the main villain, and it is mentioned in the same breath as “Halliburton.” That magic word that is honey to a leftist’s ear. Mentioning Halliburton in the popular culture is like having a plague sign nailed to a medieval city wall. Whatever comes into contact with it is automatically doomed as rotten. I mean, you can discredit the Dalai Lama by attaching him to Halliburton. You can even discredit Deepak Chopra by attaching him to Halliburton . . . though you can also do that just by reading his books.
So, the real culprit of the story is Dyncorp, who covers up its employees’ abuse and, of course, and you knew, this was coming . . . the State Department that covers up for Dyncorp. The plotline gets rapidly obsessed with the military contractors and the State Department as if they are the ones who invented sex slavery and prostitution.
And, of course, the State Department and Dyncorp are now hell-bent on killing Kathy, just like they were hell-bent on killing Valerie Plame, right?
The assassination plot device is precious . . . and as substantiated as Mayor Bloomberg fearing that Time Square car may have been rigged to blow by an American disenchanted by a health care bill. Again, not to defend Dyncorp’s alleged attempt to get rid of a whistleblower by firing her, but there is a fine line between firing someone and firing a bullet into someone’s head.
With all their sophistication and monitoring every move of their own operative, the Dyncorp/State Department assassination plot, of course, fails.
Every time I see a noble human rights warrior targeted for assassination by an evil American State Department or corporation, I am staggered by the inefficacy of the latter in dispatching their intended target. I mean, how hard could it really be? And yet, the State Department (or whoever) never ever succeeds and the heroes end up freely exposing whatever they are determined to expose.
What makes me personally disappointed in movies like The Whistleblower is the wasted potential and its outright hypocrisy. Although it is fair to criticize, and especially to fight, those who went to protect and ended up having sex with under age girls, the screenplay of The Whistleblower fails to explore the tragedy as a result of fraudulent human nature and the overall UN corruption, but rather as a self-serving singling-out of the military contractors…the American military contractors.
If it chose, on the other hand, to document the story of abuse particular to post-war Bosnia, then it is blatantly one-sided because the peacekeepers, especially the American ones, are depicted as sex maniacs whose sole purpose is to have sex in Bosnia. Forget about putting their ass in the middle of two fratricidal maniacs and trying to calm down a millennium-long-brewed genetic animosity, the peacekeepers are here solely to abuse the young girls whom they came to protect. That’s the impression one gets from the script, and the impression is usually the result of intention.
And by shifting the focus of the movie to “America is the worst and the American military in all its forms is the darkest force since Darth Vader,” the plot of The Whistleblower loses its importance and passion because of the failure to address the cause of sex slavery and its real culprits and turns into a comic feminist rendition of Matt Damon’s wet dream fantasy Bourne movies.
In the attempt to quench a leftist thirst for putting down the military, The Whistleblower like its ilk of naïve but dangerous political movies, sacrifices the real issue of sex trafficking like a virgin to a persistent dragon of propaganda.
On a more tragic note, the creators of The Whistleblower indirectly (or, perhaps, directly) abuse children by using them for their political purposes. Letting the real culprits off the hook and chasing the American military contractors instead, proves that the creators are not really concerned about sex slavery as much as they think they are but simply use the rape of children as a platform to denigrate American military. Otherwise they would deal with real statistics that shows the American peacekeeping force as the least involved in the debauchery and abuse of all the UN peacekeeping nations worldwide.
A simple research such as the one contacted by William Norman Grigg in his article “Beasts in Blue Berets’ (published in The New American with some references to similar expositions in the Village Voice) will reveal shocking abuses, for example, of Belgian UN peacekeepers in Somalia who fried a young boy for stealing food and a Belgian Het Laatste Nieuws newspaper rewarded with a bomb threat (in Belgium) for breaking the undesired news.
The research will also reveal disturbing accounts of Italian troops torturing and abusing Somalis and a 46-page report documenting that “the criminal events were not just the result of ‘rotten apples’ that you may find in any structure, but were rather the consequence of a stretched line of command and amused compliance toward such high jinks by some junior officers.”
Then, there are 47 Canadian UN troops who served in Bosnia, yes in Bosnia, and were accused of “drunkenness, sex, black marketeering and patient abuse at a mental hospital they were guarding.” The Whistleblower is a German-Canadian co-production so where is the Canadian self criticism of this outrageous case? All you get about other UN troop abuses in the screenplay of The Whistleblower is a throwaway line that ends with the protatgonist telling the audience Americans aren’t legally accounable for anything they do.
No, Kathy, they are accountable and interestingly they proportionally commit less abuse than any other participant country as evidence after evidence will show if you only bother looking at it, instead of listening to your boyfriend!
Many international humanitarian observers and Pentagon officials note that such problems (prostitution, sex trafficking, narco-business) are predictable, given that “the international police task force [in Bosnia] is a compendium of people from diverse countries with different degrees of professionalism and training and different backgrounds in operations and ethics”. This sounds like the real problem, doesn’t it?
Now, why the creators of The Whistleblower chose to go after the least guilty and by doing so let the real culprit slip away? Isn’t this against any investigative logic? Isn’t this truly despicable, that in an attempt to score cheap political points, which is the only real reason this movie is being made in the first place, they would go as low as to use sex slavery of underage girls? How different they are from physical abusers or those who sell these girls into slavery?
The only noble soldier with real lines is Kathy’s boyfriend, the aforementioned Dutch peacekeeper Jan, who hates the concept of his friends raping girls, but occasionally gives them a ride from the sex club when they are pissed drunk. Again, it is a matter of choice and probably based on a true boyfriend . . . but why Dutch? Were there no good American peacekeepers to fall in love with? Or may it be that real Kathy (or at least the way she is portrayed in the script) had some issues of her own, because as much as she tries to save girls from drunk peacekeepers, she just cannot stop spewing talking points on how what is considered brave for a man in America is considered bad for a woman. This is so old and so Berkeley that no serious American man can take it anymore, which explains the Dutch boyfriend.
Remember, Amsterdam is liberals’ El Dorado. Every disenchanted liberal threatens to leave oppressive America for Amsterdam the city where you can smoke pot, have abortions, enjoy tulips, neo-Calvinism, and euthanasia. Not to mention your pick of prostitutes, sitting on display in windows, many of them sex slaves themselves.
So when Kathy fears for her life, threatened by Dyncorp and the State Department, the Dutch boyfriend calls her and says, “It’s time to come home.”
Yes, Kathy welcome to Amsterdam, the safest city in the world! Make sure you visit those colorful tulip fields, the Van Gogh’s museum and, of course, Linnaeusstraat street where in the early morning of November 2, 2004, an Islamist thug barbarically murdered, by shooting, stabbing and attempting to decapitate, Van Gogh’s grandson, Theo–a real whistleblower who made a movie about women’s abuse by real villains who really kill, even in such places as Amsterdam.
Hopefully, to refute doubting loudmouths like me, the creators of The Whistleblower will make a movie one day that exposes sex trafficking and child abuse that is happening in their immediate neighborhood- the hills of Los Angeles. Thus, finally, making the point that it is not just girls from impoverished countries who are victims of sex abuse and it is not just military men who abuse them, but also young, underage or ‘barely legal’ actresses and models who are raped and abused by pacifist directors and producers right here in Hollywood.
I know that bringing up Polanski on a conservative-leaning blog is like exposing Nosferatu to the light, and being one of the most famous cases, Polanski’s sin, compared to what is really going in this town, can be considered mild. Yet, it is this connection to Polanski, as well, that moves The Whistleblower from the category of “evil Halliburton movies” to the category of “movies made by self righteous hypocrites,” like Monica Belluci, whose name you will see in the main credits of the movie as well as under the “Release child-rapist Roman Polanski” petition.
With all your love and respect for the military, not unlike Belluci’s love and respect for Polanski, I don’t think, liberal or conservative, you should be going out of your way to justify child abuse because of the peacekeepers’ combat fatigue or tough terrain filled with mines, and that’s exactly what you should expect from the people who make movies as well. When it comes to the gut-wrenching issue of using a child as a sex toy, we really should level the damn field.
“The Whistleblow” hits theatres August 5th.