The film was released by Pan-Canadian Film Distributors on December 11, 1981. It was nominated for several Genie Awards in 1982, including for Best Motion Picture. Another film adaptation of the novel was released in 2025. It was released in the United States in February of 1982 and is listed on U.S. box office sites at a film from 1982.
Plot
The film opens with a group of terrorists taking hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Munich in Germany. Ultimately, one of the hostages is shot on live television (which was a really, really big deal back in the era of this film) by the terrorist leader. The woman’s significant other, “Charles ‘Charlie’ Heller.” He's a codes analyst and computer expert for the Central Intelligence Agency CIA. He expects homicidal retribution from the CIA, but he’s told that the agency would not be mounting a revenge operation into then-Soviet puppet state of Czechoslovakia, where the terrorists have their home base. Naturally, Savage isn’t pleased by this decision by the CIA and he sets up a blackmail scheme in which he wants to go kill the terrorists himself. He gets some juicy internal information that would be highly embarrassing to the CIA and hides the evidence. He then makes his demand and is sent off for training at “The Farm” in Virginia.
While Heller is off training, the CIA is mobilized to find out where he has stashed his evidence. Dragged into the plot are the father of the murdered woman (he and Heller become close in their grief) as well as a back-stabbing reporter who sells out Heller, but doesn’t know the answers to the CIA’s questions about the evidence. Ultimately, Heller is inserted into Czechoslovakia by the CIA, but at that instant his evidence is uncovered and his control agent is now assigned to kill him. Heller blunders across the country aided by a woman keeping a safe house in Prague for the CIA and is tracked by a sophisticated and educated counterintelligence officer.
SPOILER ALERT ***
Heller manages to kill two of the three terrorists … one via a brutal poisoning and the other a creative bomb at an indoor pool. He then takes aim at the terrorist leader as the man who killed his girlfriend.
At the site where he expects his final showdown with top terrorist Horst Schräger, Heller is ambushed by his CIA trainer, Anderson, who explains that Schräger is a double agent working for the CIA who had killed his fiancée under orders to establish his bona fides by murdering an American. He insists that Heller explain his own rogue status to Schräger so that the terrorist, who believes Heller was sent by the CIA to kill him, will continue to work with the Americans.
The counterintelligence officer, who has been tracking and even once talked with Heller, overhears all this.
Schräger arrives, kills Anderson in a shootout, and is killed by Heller. The Czech officer, who has come to respect Heller, helps him and Elisabeth escape back to the west in exchange for his promise to write a book embarrassing the CIA.
In a review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin was positive in her assessment writing, "As cold-war thrillers go, this is an efficient and enjoyable one, with a good cast, a clever if overburdened plot, and a stylish brand of mayhem."[4]
In a review for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert gave the film two stars out of four and wrote, "After earning our attention with its understated, powerful opening, the movie develops into a routine, even laughable, spy thriller".[5]
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