The Grey Wolves

The Grey Wolves is engaged in the reconstruction of interesting and typically “socialist" events from 1964, when a conspiracy by the leaders of the KSSS, the KGB, and other big shots dethroned Nikita “Corn" Khrushchev and replaced him with the bland and restrained Leonid “Hairy" Brezhnev, who soon proved the generally valid rule of communist history – the quieter it is before, the bigger the disaster later. Director and screenwriter Gostev did not try to make an action thriller, but rather an accurate reconstruction (interpretation) of events, supported by declassified KGB files. This is probably the main pitfall of the film for many viewers. There are many characters in The Grey Wolves, and even the "who is who" captions do not help in their orientation, often ignored in the Czech translation. The panopticon of acting anonymous comrades is so confusing that in the first half of the film I was even happy to have recognized Brezhnev by his bushy eyes. It's also pretty crappy with regard to the momentum. Gostev tries not to miss out on anything substantial, and the pace accelerates only in the second part, when it finally comes to the more “thriller" inserts and logical denouements, in which almost everyone appears to be a spineless pig and Brezhnev their king. The Grey Wolves is filmed with almost documentary boredom and precision (the actors even have the typically green touch we know from the television broadcasts of the party congress of the 1970s and 1980s), which makes it less attractive to the audience, but adds to its credibility. When it comes to the action, it's bad because Gostev doesn't know how to do it (the sight of the grotesquely accelerated Muscovites was truly pathetic), the music sucks (only the opening Hammond rocker is fine, but I'd expect it more in a film about Vietnam). The metaphor with wolf hunting, which permeates the entire film, is, as a result, very impressive, but not so much that the film becomes more than an interesting documentary of the events of 1964 and a slightly above-average film with a truly magnificent performance by Roland Bykov as the old and doubting leader Khrushchev. (25.01.2005)