Kyle MacLachlan takes over from Rob Lowe as mercenary Sean Dillon in this third in a series of four Jack Higgins's adaptations. This espionage adventure, which premiered on The Movie Channel, is fancifully embroidered with leftover nightmares about the Third Reich, but standard in all
other respects.
Treasure hunter Henry Baker (Cedric Smith) hits the jackpot when a Caribbean dive nets him the Windsor Protocol, Hitler's long-lost directive for a Nazi resurgence. (Allegedly signed by the Duke of Windsor, the document also contains information about dormant bank accounts and 1990s
swastika-loving politicians hoping to use the money to resurrect Hitler dreams.) Baker is murdered by neo-Nazis who then terrorize his ward Jenny (Pascale Bussieres), believing she can lead them to where Baker hid the Protocol.
At the behest of British Intelligence, Sir Francis (David Hemblen) hires mercenary Sean Dillon (Kyle MacLachlan) to protects Jenny and to find the document. What Dillon doesn't realize is that Sir Francis is a Nazi sympathizer. Without knowing where it is, Jenny agrees to sell the Windsor Protocol
to the British government. Subsequently, fascist industrialist Armstrong (Kenneth Welsh) orders his thugs to ply Jenny with truth serum. When that fails, they torture and murder her friend and Baker's former pilot, Crawford (Michael Sarrazin).
Mistakenly believing that Dillon's go-between dealings with Armstrong are a betrayal, Jenny gives Dillon the slip and hides out with her pal Angela (Gillian Ferrabee), who's nearly murdered by an Armstrong henchman. Reunited with Dillon, Jenny discovers a note in a necklace given her by Baker
which leads her to the hiding place of the Protocol (in a relative's crypt). She gives the document to the treacherous Sir Francis. At the climax, Armstrong orders the execution of Sir Francis for being too wishy-washy, and Dillon infiltrates Armstrong's estate and assassinates his hired killers.
Dillon shoots Armstrong to death--but not until he has faxed the Windsor Protocol's contents to a Hitler loyalist in Washington, DC.
What a doomsday coda! By the time THUNDER POINT sputters to its conclusion, we are so saturated in gratuitous violence (e.g., gouging out Crawford's eyes), we don't care about the chances of a second coming of Hitler. The nonstop assault on our sensibilities is more to be feared than anything the
Fuhrer-fixated villains might later do. Given the gloating fondness for brutality in evidence, one would think the film's perpetrators had unearthed the Marquis De Sade's Protocol. Unlike a campy diversion like THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL (1978), THUNDER POINT is grim and humorless. The thrill sequences
are competently staged, but the direction has no brio and the cast performs by rote. The story was continued in a sequel, JACK HIGGINS' THE WINDSOR PROTOCOL (1998). (Graphic violence, extreme profanity, nudity, adult situations.) leave a comment
