THE RAINBOW WARRIOR CONSPIRACY manages to make boring the French DGSE's planning and then blowing up of the Greenpeace vessel, and the police investigation that follows. The opening credits deceive you, showing stock footage of the ship at sea and of New Zealanders protesting French nuclear testing in the South Pacific. Then the color image quality fades as the actors show up for mostly interior setups, talking heads reading their lines. I videotaped this movie in April 1993 at EP speed from a cable airing on The Movie Channel, which almost guarantees crummy video quality, receiving the standard bad signal from a Time Warner cable box and then storing away the cheaply made tape for over 14 years. Still, that stock footage had better image quality than the rest of the movie.
At 128 minutes, the runtime for the TMC broadcast, you have plenty of time to notice the giant rimmed glasses the female French agent wears, the lack of action and the constant yakking. The actual explosion that sinks the ship is not shown, just a big blast sound effect heard in the city. Jack Thompson, one of the stars, makes an appearance every so often to look upset, then vanishes for 15 minutes until there is another brief scene for him to show his outrage. Brad Davis, the reporter who won't give up (is there any other kind in bad movies), is on screen more, but so what. This docudrama is a pretty bland recital that shows the French agents at work, the New Zealand police investigators at work and Jack Thompson . . well, he was collecting a paycheck.
This movie must be hard to get, an independent production that just made it to a cable broadcast on TMC, then and now a cheap cable channel (I once saw ON THE WATERFRONT on TMC with the closed captioning on, only the captioning was out of sync so that when Rod Steiger's character is telling Marlon Brando he got him short money on the fight Brando took a dive in, ruining his boxing career, the captioning read "I could have been a contender.").
There is one scene in THE RAINBOW WARRIOR CONSPIRACY that stands out, when at the end of the movie Brad Davis is playing back his latest news report. As the report ends, there is first a picture of the Élysée Palace, then a slowly enlarging close-up of Mitterand, with a voice-over asking how high the conspiracy went, and then the film on the editor runs out. But one or two good scenes are not enough for a movie over two hours long.
Note: After my review, someone named Hellrocky wrote a short review on this movie without mentioning one detail of what happened in this dull docudrama. Hellrocky never saw this movie, the review is a generic mishmash from a boring person too lazy to fabricate a review. How pathetic.
