6 Bullets - the Movie

I just enjoyed Jean Claude Van Dammess movie, 6 Bullets.  Maybe it’s the theme.  Human trafficking. Sale of girls.  Jean Claude Van Damme plays an ex Foreign Legion mercenary who rescues stolen children.  Special effects. Lots of war and police and gangs and guns.  The pathos of the parents is real and the acting, great for a fight action movie.  But mostly it was the theme.
I couldn’t help but identify with the parents, played so very well by Joe Flanigan and Anna-Louise Plowman, who didn’t feel these men should be protected by the law since the lawlessness of such crimes reaches so high.  The corruption in sex trade has always been in hidden places of power.  Hitlers SS were drawn from the ranks of pedophiles.  Those who steal and sell children, should they ‘protected’.  Charlotte Beaumont, played the kidnapped little girl Becky Fayden so very well. Ernie Barbarash's direction brought out the best in everyone.
I am actually against the death penalty only because of the multitude of mistakes made by beaurocracies of state.  Once a health ministry person insisted they couldn’t ‘find’ me, a doctor and listed as such.  The provincial minister was much more responsive to the ridiculousness of this error and the attempted cover up.  Using his resources he got to the bottom of the business and corrected it. But how often does some lowly person face a person in power, the individual and state scenario, so well captured in Jean Luc Picard's assimilation by the Borg.   Caught in mistakes they then deny and lies.  I rarely know that the mistake is truly made until I see the glaring signs of cover up and know that it's not just a 'little mistake' but something truly 'filty' if it needs a 'cover up".   Insisting the ministry didn’t know where I lived so they could not ‘contact’ me was absurd.  Thanks to our elected minister the absurdity was appreciated and the matter quickly and thoughtfully corrected.  Do we trust such folk with the death penalty especially as too many times we learn an innocent man is imprisoned by the ''system". Thankfully the system works so very well most of the time but not always.
I’m not judging. I’ve made mistakes. We all do. I'm just don't so often make a business of 'cover up'. That only compounds an error and changes what might have been an 'honest mistake' into something wholly contemptible.
But stealing children and selling them into sex slavery isn’t just a mistake or a matter of business. It's wholly contemptible.
Jean Claude Van Dames tackles the tough subject.  The interplay between the police chief, the embassy, and the security police is particularly complex and confusing as it no doubt must be in life.  But I like the police inspector, played so well by Steve Nicolson,  his character and his acting. The bad guys are good bad guys.  I’m left kind of thinking that maybe in the rescue of children ‘vigillantism’ has it’s place.  I thought the same when the movie Machine Gun Preacher recorded the life of the man who rescued the children in African stolen from their families to serve as child soldiers.
Only today as doctors we discussed how many people who are now immigrating to Canada bring tales from their homelands where war , corruption, slave trade and gangsterism were the norm.  I’m a so fortunate to live in Canada.  The gang wars building in Surrey right now might leave several more dead but some of my patients can talk of family killed by terrorists.  The brother of my friend at last year's conference was kidnapped by Al Quada.  At UBC when a strange man touches a student a national emergency is declared and shock troops are parachuted from all over the nation. I love our innocence.
Jean Claude Van Dame gets better as he gets older too. This is a very good action movie but so much more typical of his later work his action films grapple with critically important considerations.  Thanks to Netflix I got to see this movie I might otherwise have missed.