The Square Circle
- Release Date
- 1 January 1996
- Language
- Hindi
Review
"The Square Circle" attempts an audacious premise—a Harvard activist's quixotic plot to rescue Rudolf Hess from a Berlin prison—but struggles to find coherent narrative ground between its political thriller ambitions and action-adventure impulses. Director Uli Edel brings visual competence to the West Berlin setting, and there are moments where the film genuinely captures the paranoia of Cold War espionage; the cat-and-mouse sequences between Haddad and Stroebling have teeth. However, the screenplay fractures under the weight of too many subplots and characters. John Haddad's journey from mercenary recruit to reluctant idealist could have anchored the film emotionally, but the character development remains surface-level, leaving the performances—which are earnest but underdeveloped—to compensate for script deficiencies.
The film's greatest weakness is tonal inconsistency. It can't decide whether it's a geopolitical thriller in the vein of le Carré or a heist caper, and this uncertainty sabotages pacing and stakes. The Lakas family drama feels obligatory rather than essential, and the introduction of new allies in the third act (Tom Dade, Reed-Henry) suggests a story that hasn't been fully digested before shooting. What does work is the period detail and the genuine question mark hanging over whether this insane mission might actually succeed—Edel mines genuine tension from the Berlin setting's divided nature. It's an ambitious swing that lands partially, deserving credit for
Storyline
A radical human rights activist group at Harvard in 1980 is desperate to make waves, so Kathy Lakas pitches the ultimate attention-grabber: rescuing Rudolf Hess from his Berlin prison, where he's been locked up for nearly four decades since World War II. She brings in Lebanese mercenary John Haddad to scope out whether the whole thing is even possible, and he heads to West Berlin to do reconnaissance. But the moment he arrives, everything goes sideways—a brutal gang of German thugs, led by the sinister KGB operative Karl Stroebling, kidnaps him, beats him senseless, and leaves him hospitalized and seriously questioning his life choices.
Haddad's stuck between a rock and a hard place: the mission seems impossible, Stroebling's crew is out for blood, and he's got no backup. So he tracks down an old comrade named Maroun in Paris who agrees to watch his back once he finishes an assassination job, and he meets Michael, Kathy's brother, who's equally invested in this crazy scheme. Meanwhile, back in the States, Kathy's own committee wants to kill the project entirely, so she makes the gutsy call to fund it herself by selling off a priceless family heirloom. The stakes just got real—personally, professionally, and financially.
When Haddad returns to West Berlin to keep working the angles, he bumps into Tom Dade, an American Army Major who's old friends with the Lakas family and is down to help make this rescue happen. Dade suggests Haddad might actually want to bring Reed-Henry, the British Army officer who interrogated him earlier, into the fold. Suddenly the impossible operation starts looking like it might actually have a fighting chance, with allies materializing from unexpected quarters and the whole crew coming together to pull off something genuinely audacious.