Location filming in St. Petersburg and Czechoslovakia and a moderately interesting plot overcome the usual low-budget deficiencies to make this an OK time killer.
Father Andrew Kanevsky (Martin Sheen) talks his rough-and-ready brother Vince (Chris Penn) into joining him on a trip to Russia. What he doesn't tell Vince is that he has agreed to help a group of Franciscan priests, who are being terrorized by neo-Nazis, smuggle out relics valued at $200 million
in order to help them relocate to America. When they land at the St. Petersburg airport, Andrew is kidnapped as part of a plot to intercept the jewels. Left for dead by one of the thugs, Vince makes his way to the monastery, where Father Stanislav (J.T. Walsh) explains the original plot to him.
Meanwhile, Oleg (Alexander Yatsko) and Marina (Louisa Mosendz), part of the group working to hijack the jewels, doublecross their leader and seize the treasure for themselves.
With the help of Sasha (Anna Karin), a friend of one of the priests who was murdered by the hijackers, Vince discovers the lair of the neo-Nazis. Vince figures the thieves will need a fence, and the streetwise Father Stanislav helps him locate one able to handle such a haul. But the fence tips off
Oleg and Marina, who arrange a meeting so that they can kill Vince. At the meeting site, Vince gets the drop on them and rescues Andrew. But Sasha is captured and used as a getaway hostage by the ringleader of the operation--Stanislav, actually a former KGB operative, who kills Oleg and Marina and
seizes the jewels. Vince follows the barge on which Stanislav is attempting to escape and, when he sees Sasha break free, sends his car over an overpass, crashing into the boat and destroying it.
It's not hard to figure out who the mysterious figure behind this plot is--aside from the heroes and the subordinate villains, there isn't anyone else in most of the film other than the J.T. Walsh character. It's just a matter of figuring out how the various entanglements will lead back to him.
(It turns out that everything is an elaborate ruse in which he has been using the neo-Nazis in order to grab the jewels for himself.) While the script for SACRED CARGO (which was co-written and directed by Russian playwright Alexander Buravsky) touches on issues of life in post-Communist Russia,
they're little more than window dressing (though those elements are more believable than the perfunctory romance between Vince and Sasha). (Graphic violence, sexual situations, profanity.) leave a comment