Last Best Chance (2005)

Posted on Feb 21, 2006 under Action-suspense |

Written and directed by Ben Goddard
Starring
- Fred Dalton Thompson
- Jon Gries
- Monti Sharp
- Denis Arndt
- Sergey Priselkov

Westerners of my generation grew up with an almost inborn expectation that everything would eventually end in nuclear annihilation, the Ragnarok to which our history inevitably led. In a world with the hair-triggered weaponry to kill each of us forty times over, what were the odds we’d escape being killed at least once? I saw The Day After on TV when I was twelve; I had nightmares about it for years after. And the worst part about the nightmares was that they were still scary when I was awake, because one day, I was certain, I’d try to wake up and discover that this time the nightmare was real.

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the attending evaporation of the Cold War, I felt like a terminal cancer patient being told that his tumors had mysteriously and permanently vanished. It wasn’t just the defeat of a political enemy; it was an almost-giddy realization that we don’t necessarily have to die in an atomic holocaust, after all! My generation wouldn’t be the final period at the end of the story of human civilization! My children won’t have to grow up beneath the weighty knowledge that, no matter what you do, it will all end in hell on earth!

Please understand, I’m not saying you shouldn’t trust men who wear bowties per se…

And of course, fanatical bastards like al-Qaeda can’t bear that anyone should live without the grim awareness of annihilation. Too much potential for happiness offends their perverse conception of Allah. They’re determined to bring the cloying fear back onto the heads of my children, or better yet, make the nightmare a reality — a condemnation I earn by the cardinal sin of believing that their malicious, petty, vindictive version of God doesn’t deserve my worship.

And unfortunately, we’ve enabled the rat-bastards. The old Soviet Empire expired so far into its last gasp that it had no resources to secure and safeguard its nuclear materials, like a squinty-eyed gunfighter who walks away in surrender from the showdown on Main Street, but leaves his gun behind for the children to play with. And too many other nations have desperately scraped together whatever resources they could to join the big boys in the Nuke Clubhouse before they had the wherewithal to keep their marbles in their pockets.

“It’s not easy, seeing green…”

Last Best Chance (you knew I’d have to get to the movie eventually) is a short but dense docudrama, putting forth a wholly plausible scenario of al-Qaeda operatives gaining access to multiple sources of fissionable material. An underpaid Russian army lieutenant (Mark Antony Krupa) is approached by a post-Soviet druglord (Gregory Hlady) to help him gain a couple of missile warheads for some foreign clients. A turncoat security guard in Belarus (Vitali Makarov) helps a team of mercenaries enter an old Soviety nuclear research facility and exchange highly-enriched uranium rods for dummies. A government scientist in South Africa (Noel Burton) smuggles 50 kilograms of fissionable material, little by little, to a cell operating out of the Sudan. Chatter does make it back to the US and Russian governments, but once the bomb parts pass out of their local resting places, it’s almost impossible to tell where they go.

With its dense plotlines, its handheld camerawork, and its lack of a designated protagonist, this slick forty-five minute film seems almost like an episode of Law & Order: IAEA, a feeling intensified by the presence of Senator-turned-actor Fred Dalton Thompson (the D.A. on all four Law & Order shows) as the President of the United States. The action switches easily back and forth between the three missions to produce or procure an atomic weapon, the two al-Qaeda masterminds (Hisham Mokhtar and Fajer al-Kaisi) who manipulate their lackeys from afar, and the President’s Cabinet, who are beset by increased intelligence “chatter” but find themselves wholly unable to pinpoint and anticipate their quick-moving enemy in time to forestall a catastrophe.

**“Keep walking around. I want people to think this is The West Wing.“**

Along the way there’s a good deal of exposition on the volume of nuclear material still unsecured (300 metric tons in the former Soviet Union, more than half of the Cold War total), the porousness of American borders, and the inability of the international community to focus past their immediate day-to-day concerns and pony up the as-yet-uncollected $20 billion pledged for nuclear weapons clean-up. Given that this is an advocacy film, such necessary exposition is delivered in surprisingly smooth bite-sized pieces, as cabinet members discuss and argue the various facts. (Only one actress, Nancy Helms playing Secretary of State, forgets that she’s supposed to be talking to the department heads of the federal government and instead slips into a didactic tone more appropriate for a third-grade social studies class.)

And while the movie stops short of a mushroom cloud, the conclusion is not at all hopeful: One bomb makes it overland from Poland to the Chunnel between France and Britain; one travels across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, and then on a small cargo ship into Chesapeake Bay; one enters Canada packaged as a statue for a cultural exchange exhibit, and then is driven by an “idealistic” dumbass student (Paul Van Dyck) across the border into the U.S. When the closing credits roll, the end is inevitable; up to three nuclear weapons are about to be detonated in the United States, and there’s no way that anyone can stop them.

“We’re basing our damage projections on the aftermath of the last NBA championship game…”

Following the film proper is a ten-minute conversation between Tom Brokaw (now that he’s retired, he can start working on being the next Walter Cronkite) and two of the architects of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which sponsored the production of the film: Former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn and Republican Senator Richard Luger. While their presentation is informative and reinforces the facts presented, it also underscores the wisdom of presenting the main program as a docu-drama, since there are few things less engaging than watching three old, benign white guys having a scripted conversation on a faux-news set. Being politicians working on a bipartisan issue, the senators come across more positively than the feature does, mainly because they’re trying to goad the world into working toward an achievable goal, rather than present a worst-case scenario that occurs once it’s too late for preventive measures.

So: The film itself gets fairly high marks, although the denouement is possibly a little too subtle for the enormity of the problem; the President’s last scene, in which he realizes his utter helplessness to stop what’s coming, is far less ominous than it needs to be. But on the whole it’s a professional film which presents a likely scenario without succumbing to preachiness or out-and-out propaganda. In fact, given the enormity of the subject matter, it could likely have stood a little more bombast; mushroom clouds really aren’t a subject which demands subtlety and nuance.

“Okay, technically the guy didn’t specifically ask if we were carrying any nuclear devices, so we’re in the clear!”

If either the subject matter or the film as described interest you, you’re in luck; the DVD is available free from the Nuclear Threat Initiative at www.lastbestchance.org.