American Renegades 2019

     In 1995, a group of American Navy Seals is stationed in war-torn Bosnia.   One of the team members, Stanton Baker has been seeing a beautiful Bosnian woman.  Lara told him that there is a massive underwater stash of Nazi gold in a nearby lake.  During WWII a group of Yogoslav Partisans blew up a dam to flood the town of Grahovo.  The Germans were hiding treasures pilfered from Paris.  Supposedly, there are twenty-seven tons of gold bars?  The team will need to figure out how to get this massive amount of weight to the surface?  They plan to split the money with Lara, she will use her money to help the Bosnian people who have suffered during the war.

     There are some fun action scenes in the beginning that get the team a good yelling from Levin (J.K. Simmons) their superior officer!!  The diving sequences are very complex.  The Seals are the good guys and of course there is a bad guy tracking them and out to eliminate them any way he can!!  The reviews are a mixed bag, some good, some bad.  3 ½* (I liked this movie)  

             

106 min, Action directed by Steven Quale with J.K. Simmons, Sullivan Stapleton, Charlie Bewley, Sylvai Hoeks, Joshua Henry, Diarmaid Murtagh, Dimitri Leonidas, Clemens Schick, Ewan Bremner, Peter Davor, Hahamadou Coulibaly, Alain Blazevic, Karim Cherif, Denis Brizic.

Note:  Imdb 5.4* out of 10*, Rotten Tomatoes 6% critic 43% audience, CommonSenseMedia.com 3* out of 5* age 14+, 2* positive, 1* role, 4* violence, 3* sex, 3* language, Jeffrey M. Anderson, Roger Ebert 2* Simon Abrams, Metacritic 33 out of 100 with 8 critics (mixed 6, negative 2), Amazon 3.9* out of 5* with 184 reviews. 

Special Note:  Filmed in Ogulin, Karlovac, Hum, Zagreb; Lokve, Gorski kotar, Croatia; AED Studios, Lint, Flanders, Belgium; Studio Babelsberg, Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany.  J.K. Simmons is the only American actor in this film because Joshua Henry is actually Canadian.  Director Steven Quale has also directed Strike Back star Richard Armitage in Into the Storm.  He will direct another Strike Back protagonist Sullivan Stapleton. The British Special Forces are assigned the call sign “22SAS” while trying to organize the extraction at the start of this film.  This would never happen in real life!!  It would give away the fact that the world’s Elite Special Forces Unit (22^nd Special Air Service Regiment) are operating in the area.  During the scene destroying the dam, the rush of water from the reservoir above the town will destroy and wash away almost everything below it.  The level of the water below will drain back down to where it was before the dam was destroyed.  It would be approximately the same as it was before the dam was built.  A town below the dam would not be submerged in a lake years later?  A diver is shown with 2 bars of gold in his right hand?  This would be impossible because it has already been stated that the bars weight 27 pounds.  That would mean the diver could carry 54 pounds in one hand?