Sleepers
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: David Calder, Joanna Kanska, Michael Gough, Nigel Havers, Warren ClarkeBrand: Acorn
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 211 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-03-27
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Acorn Media
Movie Reviews of Sleepers
Movie Review: The Wrong End of the Stick!
Summary: 5 Stars
This brilliant satire on the bumbling post-Cold-War intelligence services of the UK, the USSR, and the USA, who spend so much time spying on each other that each service wildly misinterprets what the other is actually doing, is not to be missed. The plot may unfold slowly, but it will soon have you laughing out loud. The two KGB sleeper spies left out in the cold of England are Nigel Havers and Warren Clarke. The former, who has taken the capitalistic financial world of London by storm, is thoroughly delightful, and the latter, who has settled down with a wife, three children and a stuffed toy monkey named Morris in a working-class neighborhood in Manchester, is thoroughly lovable. During the previous twenty-five years of their sleeperhood, both have become typically and irrevocably English.
Many of the laughs come from the fine supporting cast (whose names Acorn Media, characteristically, has not provided on the DVD case): the two terribly proper MI5 agents, especially the cheese-paring "C" character who demands that his junior officer give a scrupulous account for every pound and pence he has spent on dinner at Burger King; the beauteous all work-and-no-play KGB agent, without an ounce of humor and the junior spy who loves her but cannot persuade her to go with him to see the latest West-End musical; the spy-master who originally sent the pair to England and has meanwhile landed in a Soviet looney bin; the head of the Soviet trade commission (nudge-nudge, wink-wink) with an American accent that is far more convincing than those of the two brash CIA officers, to whom the British refer dryly as their "cousins." The antics of all of them as they squabble over territory keep the laughs coming one after the other.
Underlying the humor is the serious issue of communication (or lack of it) between intelligence agencies; and historical hindsight indicates that some of the misreading----getting "the wrong end of the stick"----by one side about what the other side is doing, is not so far off the mark. As one of the spies remarks in the film, when something is so wildly improbable, it is very likely to be true.
In any event, "Sleepers" is a keeper!
Summary of Sleepers
The Cold War is over but all the players are still ready for a rumbleAs seen on Masterpiece Theatre
Soviet agents Sergei Rublev and Vladimir Zelenski so successfully infiltrated the culture they were sent to spy on in 1965 that they have become more English than the English. Now living as financier Jeremy Coward and brewery worker Albert Robinson, the "sleeping" spies are horrified to learn that, after 25 years, the KGB is looking for them. The hunt also awakens the bumbling bureaucrats of MI5 and their ultra-paranoid CIA counterparts, who work themselves into a lather trying to figure out what the KGB is up to.
The poignancy of the sleepers? predicament plays out amid a hilarious cross-cultural send-up of the secret agent game. Nigel Havers (Manchild, A Perfect Hero) and Warren Clarke (Dalziel and Pascoe, The Onedin Line) star in this touching human comedy, remembered as one of the best British exports of the 1990s.
DVD SPECIAL FEATURES INCLUDE cast filmographies and scene selection.
Note: due to music rights, this program has been modified for home video presentation.
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