The Whistleblower

Two years ago, producer-writer Luc Besson scored a big hit with his sex-trade revenge thriller Taken. Liam Neeson played a retired CIA operative out to rescue his daughter from seedy slavers and depraved Arabs. Worldwide the movie earned north of $225 million. Slick, frantic and violent, it took a serious real-world subject and turned it into pop-culture trash. If only its fans cared as much about the U.S. military contractors who help perpetuate these very same practices in real life.

Dyncorp International, a Virginia-based government contractor that does work for the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, has landed nearly $6 billion in taxpayer-funded projects. A Wikileaks report demonstrates that the company was involved in the facilitation of sexual exploitation of children in Afghanistan. This is not a first for the company. In the late 1990s, they were also implicated in the Bosnian sex-trafficking scandal depicted in Larysa Kondracki's tense and unflinching The Whisteblower. I have a sneaking suspicion Kondracki's movie won't earn one-tenth of Taken's box office. After all, many of the bad guys turned out to be Americans, and nobody gets blown up with a rocket launcher.

Rachel Weisz stars as Kathryn Bolkovac, a real-life Nebraska cop who signed up for U.N.-affiliated peacekeeping duties in Sarajevo and uncovered a horrific conspiracy of criminals, law enforcement officials and corporate contractors who kidnapped, tortured and brutally prostituted teenage girls. While the facts have been changed for both dramatic effect and legal cover (Dyncorp is called Democra), the basics of the story mostly stay intact. The crimes and cover-ups did occur, Bolkovac did apply her cop skills to reveal corruption that reached into the upper ranks of the U.S. State Department, corporate interests and the United Nations, and she was, indeed, fired and blackballed for her efforts.

As a throwback to the politically conscious, paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, The Whistleblower does well mixing muckraking social commentary and suspense. Kondracki (who co-scripted) avoids typical missteps of the genre, never letting her film get too didactic, expository or depicting her heroine as infallibly virtuous. Instead, she weaves an earnest and oftentimes harrowing account of Bolkovac's investigations, bureaucratic frustrations, and growing recognition that no one can be trusted. The direction is unadorned and, to be frank, a tad pedestrian, and the plotting gets a bit episodic, but Weisz's standout performance elevates everything around her. Believably balancing her character's unfamiliarity with her foreign surroundings with a dogged sense of mission and, eventually, outraged anguish, the actress deepens what might've otherwise been a cardboard protagonist. Vulnerable but tough, Weisz makes us care almost as much as she does.

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