Shot Through the Heart (1998)

Touches You

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

There was a civil war in the US 150 years ago,no one truly remembers it.There is the terror of sniper combat so well displayed in the film"Enemy at the gates"that was reviewed on my blog,but it was uniformed soldiers.We begin to understand sectarian violence from Iraq and Afghanistan BUT in a white European country,in our own lifetime,before 9/11 changed our focus on everything?No I doubt anyone truly understood it or does to this day,but since WW11 the first war crimes trials were held because of it. The country of Yugoslavia,was a patch work of forced uniting of diverse Balkan peoples of different ethic and religious backgrounds that fell apart when the strongman holding it together,Marshal Tito,died. Its capital city was Sarajevo,home to a Winter Olympics Game in the recent past,and a shinning example to the world that a different sort of new kind of capitalism/socialism,much like what China IS succeeding with today,could work in Europe. Tito's death changed everything to again remind us all that old hate and grudges lie just below the surface and rise like puss from a wound and fester to infect and kill us all. This film doesn't shed much new light how that came to pass in what was Yugoslavia,but it does focus a narrow light on what people living a very similar life as we in the US live,can fall into when "wounds"are not treated and how fragile our life styles really can be. In a sense this is very personnel human horror story without zombies.HBO films made another film worthy of all our attention to understand what modern war in cities and sectarian violence can be right here if we are not smart and allow ourselves to let the mess our country is in continue.The families and people in this film are like us.Middle class,educated and see their lifes decent into a living and in many cases dying hell. Congress and the President should see this picture ,as a teachable moment,before they forget how fractured our own country has truly become.Like most docudramas the story is a copulation of many events to give a picture of a event that is not rational but that did happen.

I saw this film a while ago on a Video CD.I will 1st mention the good points.The movie, at first, at least tries to appear that it is not biased, like not showing one character as black and the other as white. Both main characters are friends and co-exist very well in an country and economy that is not booming while at the same time not failing. Their families get together and have parties and they practice their favorite sport, Sport Rifle shooting, as comrades not as competitors.But, after the 1st 15 minutes the plot runs into a fork in the road. The audience is expected to believe that for some unknown reason these friends must hate each other. That for some unknown reason Bosnia is now on a path to conflict. Sure, the script adds in TV footage which the characters appear to be watching live news programs in English, but the clips are from 1993 not 1992 when the war began.The history, the 1990 elections, the people who caused the war are not mentioned. The movie tries to place the blame with Karadzic, who had been a Presidential candidate and leader of the Bosnian Parliament's 2nd Largest Party(SDP). According to the Constitution of Bosnia, the SDP was to have the Presidency in 1992, but there was a Coup in January. The Bosnian Islamic Democratic Action Party seized total control and held a segregated referendum in March in which it declared itself the law in Bosnia and announced Secession.The history of the IDAP begins with Bosnian Muslim Alija Izetbegovic, a man suspiciously absent from "STtH". He was a student of Nazism in WW2. He even wrote his own "Mein Kampf" in which he stated: "It is not in fact possible for there to be any peace or coexistence between 'the Islamic Religion' and non-Islamic social and political institutions".In 1990 he lost the IDAP elections to "pro-Yugoslavia Moderate" Fikret Abdic, a Bosnian Muslim, that worked with Christian Serbs during the Civil War, and who treated his supporters like brothers. Abdic was prevented from taking power by Izetbegovic, who lost the elections but seized the seat of power.The events from above are missing from the movie, but they are the factual events that lead to the war.There were problems with props too. Serb soldiers in the movie were wearing Soviet WW2 helmets, which they did not use. Also the one soldier was holding an M-1944 WW2 rifle only used by USSR not Yugoslavia.The Director and Script Writers had a chance, but they chose to re-write history.

"Shot Through the Heart" is an even tempered, dogged, austere production of people caught in the rift in Sarajevo during the Bosnia war. The film focuses on two long time friends, both expert competitive marksmen, who find themselves as snipers on opposite sides of the conflict. Not unlike other "friend against friend" civil war stories (eg: Gettysburg), the two men are on a collision course with the ultimate showdown. A well managed drama which imparts some sense of the strife in the splintering of Yugoslavia while telling its story of families and friends divided, "Shot..." is a worthy film making effort.

First, in the movie, the bad guys (the serbs) are really dark complicated, and the good guys are (muslims) lite complected. Serbs are dark, thats because of muslim blood, in them, from the turkish conquest of the balkans for 500 yrs. It doesn't tell the t.v. audience, thats one of the serbs major distrust of the muslim population.