The Fourth Protocol

An absorbing, intelligent and suspense-filled film... It's streamlined and rich at the same time -- like the best of the James Bond films, but serious.

The Fourth Protocol is first-rate because it not only is a thriller, but it also pays attention to its characters and shows how their actions grow out of their personalities. Like Michael Caine's other recent British spy film, "The Whistle Blower," it is effective not simply because it's a thriller but also because for long stretches it simply is a very absorbing drama.

The film likewise lurches here and there, but for the most part its aim is true. Action accelerates nicely, a series of pointless cuts to parallel action in Moscow and London provides a false but convincing sense of urgency, and not until the final moments do the filmmakers run out of steam. They have an answer for that, too, in the film's coda. [28 Aug 1987, p.D5]

The movie is entertaining on a rudimentary, never-to-be-taken-seriously level. On the rare occasions when it does rise above the material, it's because Pierce Brosnan is chillingly effective as an assassin with the body temperature of a snake. [26 Aug 1987]

The Fourth Protocol was a great in-flight read, and it will probably be a great in-flight movie, too-though in a theater it looks a little pale and overextended. [28 Aug 1987, p.FC]

What is missing is any real tension or psychological detail that might lend plausibility to all the hocus-pocus about East-West political and military intrigue.

As The Fourth Protocol begins at the outside and curls its way into the center of its wildly complex plot, it becomes almost a "Saturday Night Live" spy spoof. We're saturated with detail: Where will the nested Russian folk-art dolls, the visiting violinist's patent-leather shoes and the American Air Force officer's randy wife fit into the Greater Scheme of Things? Gradually, as our eyes glaze over, it becomes very hard to care--and even harder to suppress a giggle.