Loner

Original title : Odinochka (Russian, meaning Loner)

Language : Russian

Year of release : 2010

Run time : 1h40m

Genre : Thriller

Cast : Danila Kozlovsky

In 1998, Andrei Gromov seems to live a happy life with his girlfriend. He actually asks her to marry him, and asks her to wait for him for two years, as he has to leave for work.

He is a FSB agent who accepts a weird undercover mission to go to prison (I don’t know why would anyone agree to do this!), for 3 years, just to get close to Prohorov and his group.

Maksim’s wife is asking him to leave the detective work, as she fears for his life, unable to sleep at night until he gets home. She works at a bank, and this is the last time he sees her alive, as the bank is robbed, and the robber shoots her and the guard.

The robbery was a set up, so Andrei could be caught and put in prison.

They catch him, as they have his prints on the murder weapon, and at the police station, they beat him up, because they think he k1lled the detective’s wife.

Andrei talks to his superior before being taken to prison (the sentence is 12 years, but they say the mission would only be 2-3 years), and he tells him they won’t talk to him for the first year he’ll stay in, they’ll contact him in the second!

12 years later, Andrei is finally released from the work colony prison, and he has no money, no prospects, nothing. He goes to see his girlfriend, who is now married, has a child, and is pregnant with another. He realized he wasted (ruined) his life on a stupid,failed mission.

Turns out, Prohorov died in the first year he was imprisoned, of natural causes, and his trusted superiors forgot about Andrei.

 

Maksim Frolov still goes to his wife’s grave, talking to her daily.

Andrei wants answers as he served a 12 years sentence for something he didn’t do, and once he starts looking for them, his superiors (who are now very rich) start worrying about repercussions, so they once again, make him a wanted man, as they want him dead, for they are corrupted.

The made-for-tv movie was actually good, I enjoyed it. It has quite a few fighting and action scenes which I liked.

Andrei is a sad character, who wasted his youth on a failed mission, giving his trust to people he shouldn’t have.

His superiors, especially one of them, doesn’t care he ruined his life, he is just vile.

One thing I found odd, was that they didn’t even change his name, they used his real name and gave him a fake police record of robberies, meaning they made him a real criminal on paper.

SPOILER – What I found shocking is that at the end we find out the robbery was staged by the FSB agents and they actually k1lled people! The whole time I thought they pinned Andrei to some real robbery case, and let the robber get away with it. They did let the robber get away with it ,but he was a police officer, who didn’t mind k1lling 2 people! END OF SPOILERS

You can watch the full movie on the Dailymotion platform, but it only has Romanian subtitles.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xa62t2c

Rating : Worth a watch !