Scorpio

An old-fashioned type of film, in which you identify a spy in a crowd in a fraction of a second by their piercing eyes, intense and gloomy gaze, and a menacing tone that is heard when the camera focuses on them. The surveillance is as inconspicuous as a hand grenade on a plate in the school cafeteria, secret agents have nothing else to do but shoot each other, and 60-year-old Burt Lancaster, with a serious injury, easily climbs several floors on a ladder and then takes out a significantly younger opponent. I would envy his physique even at thirty. Scorpio is a naively conspiratorial film that relies on a star-studded cast but looks up to the heights of the genre from a respectable distance. On the other hand, it doesn't insult us with blatant stupidity, and genre fans should not have any major issues with it. Overall impression: 60%. (12.02.2017)

The king of mediocrity Michael Winner and his spy film? Ddear viewer, sleep. Antics of secret services seen a hundred times before, now centered around two men. An older veteran who is always one step ahead of his opponents, but who also suspects that playing on one chessboard against both black and white will hardly end in his victory, and against him, a CIA-paid Nemesis who likes cats and occasionally drops a witty remark about the future (like reserving a spot in the cemetery). It’s true that it slightly steps out of indifference after the chase on the construction site, but it doesn’t compare to Lino Ventura in similar positions. The only interesting thing is that the director and his two main stars were all born under the sign of Scorpio. Expressed as a probability ratio, it’s 1 in 1,728, which is about the same chance as not having Alain Delon's character brush off his clothes into a chest at the end of a film of this type. (15.12.2022)