Boxoffice-November.1988

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committed a messy murder. Gino is persuaded to take the rap
for the murder, in exchange for a big sum of money.
Enter Jerry (Joe Mantegna), a contumacious, low-level loser
who is "on probation" with his mobster employers His last
chance to redeem himself is to i', all
liquid eyes and adolescent iinpaticnce, decid
find his "Khan," or clan leader, has been reduced to a reddish
stain in the sand by Dakal's tank treads, he assumes the role ol
clan leader and swears vengeance, Taj's far more mercenary
cousin provides the means by which it can be exacted
Then, unexpectedly, the focus switches to the tank, and wr
arc introduced to the infra-structure of a Soviet military crew
Like the dust-plastered sedan that whipped around the dusiv
plains of South Texas in "Fandango," the "Beast" carries ,1
diverse crew of five Besides Dakal, there is the naive gunloader
Golikov (Stephen Baldwin); the Soviet-educated Afghani
guide translator (Erick Avari); the boisterous, amoral
brake fluid-guzzling gunner Cominsky (Don Harvey); and
best of all, the highly-competent, moralistic intellectual Constantine
Koverchenko (Jason Patric, looking much like lohn
Lcnnon in "How I Won The War "), who comes to doubt both
the moral intent of the war and Dakal's sanity.
Dakal, who regards the Afghanis with the same contempt
with which he combated Nazis during World War II. shoots his
own Afghani guide, instinctively certain that the man was a
traitor When Constantine protests, Dakal orders him tied to a
slab of rock, booby-trapped with a hand grenade, and left foi
dead in the desert Constantine is eventually rescued by Taj
and the two exact their vengeance against Dakal together
While all the Afghanis in the film speak in a subtitled Pushtu
dialect, the film's Russians speak American English, anil
their state-of-the-art soldiering and strained camaraderie
evoke the rowdy, doomed marines of "Aliens" The Americanization
of the Soviets ( they have regional accents and even us