Updated 2/1/2013
Behind Enemy Lines (2001)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159273/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_Enemy_Lines_(film)
The film's fictional plot is centered on a story of uncovering a massacre in the Bosnian War of 1992-1995 by an American naval aviator.
Admiral Leslie Reigart's (Gene Hackman) carrier battle group is in the final stages of a NATO peace keeping deployment when the F/A-18F Super Hornet of Chris Burnett, the aircraft's Weapons System Officer (Owen Wilson) and his pilot Jeremy Stackhouse (Gabriel Macht), launched from the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson is shot down by a SA-13 SAM controlled by renegade Serbian forces led by General Miroslav Lokar (Olek Krupa) and his second in command Colonel Viktor Bazda. Lokar is committing a secret genocidal campaign against the Bosniak people in a no-fly zone that the NATO plane violates and photographs; wanting to avoid being discovered, Lokar has the plane shot down and executes Stackhouse while Burnett escapes to the countryside.
From then on Burnett is on the run, narrowly escaping from the Serb attack time after time. All the while he maintains contact with his Admiral, to lead him to a safe point for a rescue attempt. The resulting attempt to rescue the downed aviator are complicated by political considerations which are enforced on Reigart by his NATO commanding officer Admiral Juan Miguel
Piquet (Joaquim de Almeida), including using his own team for the extraction rather than the team that Reigart put together.
Burnett is chased by Sasha (Vladimir Mashkov), a Serbian sniper and right hand man to Bazda. He escapes death after he slides off a dam while being shot at by Sasha. In another gruesome scene he falls into a mass grave and hides under dead bodies. He makes his way to Hac, a small town in Bosnia on the back of a pickup with a group of fighters. The entire town is at an all out war. When Serbian forces attack the mall he and the fighters are hiding in, he manages to flee by disguising himself in a Serb militant outfit after dressing up a dead Serb militant with his pilot suit. He loses his radio in the attack. Bazda and Sasha pursue Burnett in the forest as Burnett attempts to make it to the safe zone where he will be rescued by helicopter.
In the pursuit, Bazda steps on a mine and his ally Sasha leaves him to die. The situation intensifies when Serbs claim that the downed aviator was shot dead by Bosnian guerrillas, after they find their dead soldier in the pilot suit. The rescue attempt is called off as Burnett sees the helicopter fly away.
Diplomatic Siege (1999)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0171227/
A bomb expert (Peter Weller) is sent to the US embassy in Bucharest to defuse an old cold war bomb that is stored in the basement. Unexpectedly, a group of terrorists representing the "Serbian Liberation Front" raid the embassy, killing a number of people and taking 37 hostage. The special mission operative must save his son and an old flame (Daryl Hannah).
Meanwhile an anti-terrorist squad is sent on the rescue mission. The squad leader (Tom Berenger) turns out to be old friends with the head terrorist (Adrian Pintea).
Prime Suspect 6: The Last Witness (2003) (TV)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0365651/
Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison's investigation of the murder of a Bosnian refugee leads her to one, or possibly two, Serbian war criminals determined to silence the last witness to a massacre a decade before.
The Fourth Angel (2001)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0254334/
Jack Elgin is the European editor of The Economist, which is based in London, England. Jack has a wife named Maria and three
kids named Joanne, Julia, and Andrew. Jack subtly changes the family vacation from a lazy week of Mediterranean fun and sun in Corfu, Greece, to a tour of India, because of a story he has to cover. Maria is not as impressed by this as the kids are. Jack himself envisioned a chance to simultaneously work an easy reporting assignment and spend a little quality time with his family. But on the way to India, the airplane, a 747 owned by AM Air, an American airline, makes an unscheduled stopover in
Limassol Cyprus, because of a mechanical problem. After a while of waiting inside the Limassol airport, everyone gets back on the plane -- which is then hijacked by a group of terrorists known as the August 15th Movement, led by a Serbian man named Ivanic Loyvek and his right-hand man Karadan Maldic. And they are demanding $50,000,000 from the US State Department in one hour, or everyone on the airplane will die. The demand is met, and Loyvek and Maldic start releasing the women and children, with the men to go last. But as soon as a front passenger door is opened, a local police team gunning for the terrorists opens fire. The flight attendants frantically open the rest of the airplane's doors and start getting passengers out, but the terrorists start killing passengers, leading to an explosion. Maria, Joanne, and Julia get out of the airplane, and then Jack, holding Andrew, gets out -- only to watch Maria, Joanne, and Julia get shot by the terrorists. Jack tries to hide Andrew's face so he can't see it. Maria and Joanne are dead, and Julia is still alive -- but Julia burns to death while crying for help. Jack and
Andrew survive. In all, a total of 15 passengers die, and Loyvek and Maldic, the surviving terrorists, escape, knowing that they now have the $50,000,000. The hijacking would never have ended this way if the police team had waited until after the passengers were released from the airplane before getting trigger happy. Back in London, an absolutely devastated Jack is told that the terrorists were captured, but they were released and deported secretly, with no charges and no arrest, the result of some awfully compromised politics. Jack is understandably enraged that Loyvek and Maldic got off scout-free. While helping
Andrew cope, Jack tries all the legal ways to ensure justice for his family, but to no avail. Jack even pays a visit to Henry Davidson, a CIA agent who works at the American Embassy in London. Davidson tells Jack that there's little that can be done.
Obviously, the American and British governments are completely impotent when it comes to going after Loyvek and Maldic, so Jack has absolutely no choice in the matter. He must do it himself. With the help of his ex-intelligence operative friend Kate
Stockton, who is well-schooled in the finer points of international intelligence, Jack becomes a one-man anti-terrorist squadron, searching for Loyvek and Maldich. Dogging Jack's trail is FBI agent Jules Bernard, who's cooperating with Scotland Yard on anti-terrorist activities, and who suspects that Jack is the man who has been killing anyone involved in the hijacking. But as it turns out, Jules is on Jack's side, and he's willing to help Jack make those responsible pay for the deaths of his family and the other people who died in Cyprus.
Extreme Ops (2002)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0283160/
When an extreme-sports filmmaking team sets out to make a commercial featuring a gold-medal skier outrunning an avalanche, they run afoul of a Serbian war criminal hiding out in a mountain resort. So it's snowboards vs. bullets on steep slopes of snow--and if that's your thing, Extreme Ops is for you. film crew travels to the Austrian Alps near the (former) Yugoslav border to film three extreme sports enthusiasts being chased down by an avalanche for a commercial. What they don't know, however, is that they're filming near the secret hideout of Slobodan Pavle , a Serbian war criminal. Accidentally catching him on film, they become locked in a life-or-death chase through the mountains that includes skiing, snowboarding, sky diving, white water rafting, helicopters, motorcycles, and base jumping.
Sniper 2 (2002) (TV)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338450/
A former Marine sniper is lured back in on a top-secret mission to take out a Serbian general who is committing atrocities on the Muslim population.
The Hunted (2003)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0269347/combined
The move opens with some of the most brutal and vile carnage ever seen on screen. In Kosovo during the Bosnian war, a Serbian commander is killing every non-Serb thing that breathes. Men. Women. Children. It didn't matter. US Special Services Operations specialist, Aaron Hallam (Benicio Del Toro) is assigned to kill the Serbian commander. With skill and cunning, Hallam dispatches the Serb commander in a bloodbath in the commander's own blood. That is what he was trained to do. As an assassin.
The Rock (1996)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/
The FBI’s top chemical weapons specialist, a geek named Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage, in his first role since winning an Academy Award for Leaving Las Vegas) saves his co-workers from a Serbian sarin gas booby trap, The FBI Director (John Spencer) wants Goodspeed to accompany the SEAL incursion into Alcatraz and disarm the missiles.
Hunt for Justice (2005)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0449588/
http://www.reel.com/movie.asp?MID=142751
Hunt for Justice chronicles the heroic struggle of Louise Arbour, the Canadian Chief War Crimes Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, to indict Slobodan Milosevic for crimes against humanity.
The Hunting Party (2007)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0455782/
After years of covering one war after another, journalist Simon Hunt (Richard Gere) loses his composure during a live broadcast covering the Bosnian War. While his career spirals downhill, that of his long-time camera man Duck (Terrence Howard) goes in the opposite direction. Duck gets a cushy job at the network, while Hunt is left following war after war, unemployed, in an attempt to get back on top.
Years later, Duck returns to Bosnia to shoot a "puff piece" of the network anchor Franklin Harris (James Brolin) covering a peace treaty, along with fresh young journalist (and son of the network vice-president) Benjamin (Jesse Eisenberg). Duck runs into Simon--by this point, a desperate, cynical freelancer who needs a story big enough to propel him back to the realm of credibility. He tells Duck that he has the location, through a source, of Through a tip, he has located Radoslav Bogdanovic--known as "The Fox"--who is a wanted Serbian war criminal with a $5 million bounty on his head. Convinced by Simon, Duck comes along to shoot the interview, with Benjamin in tow. On the way, Simon confesses his plan to capture the Fox--something
Duck and Benjamin consider insane to even think of. Along the way, the group is mistaken for a CIA hit squad by several groups, including the United Nations police force and the Serbians themselves. It quickly becomes evident that there are people in the international community who don't wish for the Fox to be captured, and Simon, Duck, and Benjamin find themselves in well over their head.
The Peacemaker (1997)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119874/
Before Nicole Kidman could have a tragic love affair in Moulin Rouge, she first had to save Manhattan – with George Clooney's help – from a Serb with a backpack nuke in Peacemaker (1997). The villain was no less than a member of the Bosnian Serb parliament, who first killed a colleague to ensure he'd have a spot on the New York-bound delegation. His motive?
Vengeance on the UN, because snipers killed his family and the peacekeepers had done nothing to help.
Force 10 from Navarone (1978)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077572/
Some time after the successful Navarone mission, Mallory (Robert Shaw) and Miller (Edward Fox) are summoned by Cmdr.Jensen (Philip Latham) and charged with identifying and killing a spy known as "Nicolai", who appeared briefly in The Guns of Navarone. (In the film The Guns of Navarone, Nicolai was the identity of the laundry boy who was suspected to be listening in on private conversations and almost killed for it). "Nicolai" is now thought to be disguised among the Yugoslav Partisans, under the guise of a Capt. Lescovar (Franco Nero).
To get to Yugoslavia the two men are paired up with "Force 10", a sabotage unit led by Lt. Colonel Barnsby (Harrison Ford), whose target is a key bridge in Bosnia. Barnsby considers having the two older men forced upon him as an unnecessary added risk to an already dangerous mission. In order to ensure absolute secrecy, they are ordered to steal an Allied plane from an airfield in Termoli so that no information about their flight to Yugoslavia can be leaked out. However, while breaching the perimeter fence they are discovered by US M.P.'s who are escorting Sgt. Weaver (Carl Weathers) to captivity. A brawl ensues which ends with the M.P.'s overpowered and Weaver forcing his way onto the plane. After crossing the Yugoslavian coast, the plane is attacked by German night fighters, at which point most of Barnsby's team are killed, and the survivors have to bail out of the stricken aircraft.
Once on the ground the remainder of the team attempts to link up with the the communist Yugoslav Partisans (who were part of the Allied forces) and believe they have run across a group of such led by a Capt.Drazak (Richard Kiel). However, once at their camp they soon discover that these are not Partisans but a group of collaborationist Chetniks (nationalist Serb guerillas). Finding themselves in German hands, they attempt to convince the commander, Maj.Schroeder (Michael Byrne), that they are black marketeers who have escaped from Allied captivity with a valuable stash of a new wonder drug called Penicillin.
The Filthy War (2008)
http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809765472/info
http://www.aceshowbiz.com/movie/filthy_war_the/
A group of young volunteers create an international platoon to defend a village against ethnic-cleansing Serbs in Croatia at the beginning of the Yugoslav civil war.
Storm (2009)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0768239/
Storm features an international cast pair of female leads in Kerry Fox (who we most recently seen in Bright Star and might remember all the way back to Shallow Grave) and one of my favorite Eastern European discoveries in Anamaria Marinca (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days). Schmid's Storm sees Hannah Maynard (Fox), prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, is leading a trial against a former commander of the Yugoslavian National Army who is accused of the deportation and later killing of dozens of Bosnian-Muslim civilians. When a key witness commits suicide, it looks like the case will unravel, however Hannah refuses to give in. Hoping to uncover new findings.
