The Whistleblower (***)

In this dramatic thriller, Rachel Weisz plays Kathryn Bolkovac, a Nebraska cop who exposed a sex-trafficking ring while working as a contractor in Bosnia during the UN peacekeeping mission. As with The Constant Gardener, for which she won her Oscar, Weicz crusades against a conspiracy. In each case, there is a fairly black-and-white moral issue, but Whistleblower dramatizes that more vividly and personally, and it also gains some force for being a true story. However, it lacks the subtlety and emotional finesse of a movie like The Constant Gardener. With a significant exception being a UN worker played by Monica Bellucci, the characters are either entirely virtuous or clearly villainous, and the plotting is straightforward. To its credit, the story doesn’t seem either sensationalized or sanitized; while it’s certainly not the first movie to dramatize the modern international sex trade (the 2002 Swedish film Lilya 4-Ever did it better than here), it’s perhaps the highest profile film to do so. (I won’t count the exploitation film Taken.)

IMDB link


viewed at Ritz 5 8/11/11 [Women’s Way screening] and reviewed 8/14/11