Treat Williams, F. Murray Abraham, & Danny Aiello can be great actors who can make a movie worthwhile. However, the problem with the trio is that they take any movie-job, indiscriminate of quality, to pay for lunch, which means picking up any movie featuring any of them is amount to picking up a gun you find on the street, press it against your temple and pulling the trigger.
You have a 50/50 chance of hearing a *CLICK* or wondering why your brains are splattered on the street.
Unfortunately, with the Italian-produced THE THIRD SOLUTION, this gun chamber was loaded.
The film's biggest failure is that it never makes clear why exactly both the CIA and KGB are fighting their shadow war over the fact that the Vatican is negotiating a concordat with the Soviet Union. The best I could understand is that, I think, was that the Pope was to abandon Ukranian Orthodox Church from his realm in exchange for religious freedom to the Catholic Poland and the Baltics.
At least thats what I got from this this muddled train wreck of a movie.
Thing is, with Catholic theology at centre of this murder-mystery, if made clear and very much its consequences at severe stake, THE THIRD SOLUTION could have been as fun and enticing as Michael Apted's adaptation of GORKY PARK, except instead of a Soviet cop drama, its involves the Vatican.
I mean, the central idea could have worked as a nice detective story. In 1933 the Vatican contracted the infamous Reichskonkordat with Nazi Germany that basically traded away the political rights of German Catholics in exchange for non-state inteference of Catholic private schools (an agreement that Hitler of course broke immediately).
But instead, THE THIRD SOLUTION is about Treat Williams running around and F. Murray Abraham scheming himself into a plot twist that is supposed to be shocking, but instead I kept trying, and failing, to understand the logic of it.
Maybe the fourth solution I should have picked was never rent this stinker in the first place.
P.S. - Just because this movie sucks and annoyed me, the spoiler is that Abraham's Vatican priest character is a KGB operative.
