The Human Factor (1975)

Forget all the bad words you heard about The Human Factor. Ok. Are they forgotten now? Wiped out? Gone? Finito? Good, because this is a movie that surprised me big time. This is the second time I started to watch it, the first time I managed to survive a half hour or so before I gave up. It happens sometime when I was prepared for something completely different. So what the hell did I expect? I have no idea. Sure, it's shot in Italy, but that doesn't mean it would be action-packed from start to finish. It was a directed by a director, Edward Dmytryk, at the end of his career and with George Kennedy in the lead. Well, that beginning surely fooled me, because it's what the common man call a build-up. A slow one, but still a build-up...

George Kennedy is John Kinsdale, an American computer engineer who lives in Italy together with his family. One night he comes home and finds the police and media outside his house, his family has been brutally executed! The police tells him they will do their best to catch the killers, but he can't let go of it and start using databases (which he can access at his work, a military facility) all over the world to try to find something that can lead him to the guilty criminals. But he doesn't stop there, but also takes on a fake identity and befriends other parts of the investigative team. Soon he has that lead, and goes after for revenge...

The Human Factor starts of slow, and slow in a gritty realistic way. There's no beautiful sets or fancy camera movements, just Kennedy living his life in Naples together with his family and the grief after the killings. There's talking and talking... and it was a mistake to give up the first time. This is one of those movies that uses the build-up to make us really get to know John Kinsdale and after that half hour we're with him in his hunt. I'm not kidding when I say that it gets surprisingly thrilling during the way, especially when John thinks he has located the next family to be killed - forces himself into their house and threatens them with a gun, just to make them understand that someone else will try to kill them.

If The Human Factor was made today, Jason Statham would have played John Kinsdale and be an expert in MMA. That would have made the movie so much boring, because Kinsdale in Kennedy's performace is just an ordinary, unfit bloke and a receding hairline and a high blood pressure. He's the average joe with a gun and an anger that I've seldom seen in a movie. He goes from being just an obsessed computer nerd to a violent, violent man using his length and weight (Kennedy is a very big guy!) taking down the terrorists one by one.

The action is quite low until the last half hour when the shit finally hits the fan. It's impressive stuff, good stunts and bloody. The fight between Kennedy and one of the terrorist in an backyard is excellent, but that's nothing compared to the finale when he alone takes down every terrorists who has taken over a supermarket! Bloody squibs-deluxe!

In the end The Human Factor becomes a very satisfying revenge-movie which clearly never makes Kinsdale either a hero or a victim. He's just an angry man.

The DVD from Dark Sky offers a very fine interview with the man himself, The Kennedy Factor, and he seems to be a very fine gentleman, very human and intelligent. He tells about his life and also a little bit about WW2, where he was a soldier. He's someone who finally doesn't try to romanticize war. He says how it is: "War is something that kills young people, and it's aweful". Thanks George, you're the best.