Savior movie review & film summary (1998)

Guy buys into this ethic in the early scenes of the movie, blaming all Muslims for his family's murder by a lunatic fringe. Later, he is forced to focus on individual people and finds it is not so easy to hate when you know someone. Empathy is the enemy of tribalism.

In Bosnia, he and his best friend Dominic (Stellan Skarsgard) kill for hire, and sometimes discuss what they do. Guy: "You've done nothing wrong here." Dominic: "It feels like I did." We see Guy use a sniperscope to take aim at an innocent boy looking for his goat. Guy kills him. A flashback shows how Guy's friend was killed by a girl concealing a grenade. An eye for an eye.

A truce is declared. Guy and his Serbian comrade Goran (Sergej Trifunovic) take custody of a pregnant Serbian woman. Goran knows the woman's family. In a tunnel, he drags the woman out of the car and starts kicking her in the stomach. Her crime: being pregnant with a Muslim child.

"She was raped," Guy protests. This is a meaningless concept to Goran. She has been defiled, and if she were a decent woman, then of course she would already have killed herself. No blame attaches to her rapists, and we assume Goran himself has enthusiastically raped as many Bosnian women as convenient, trusting them to kill themselves or be killed by their fathers, brothers or helpful male neighbors.

Guy, who has spent years killing for hire, who himself has killed in revenge, now finds he can stomach no more. He kills Goran and finds himself in possession of the woman, named Vera (Natasa Ninkovic), and her child. All of this is prologue to the film's central sections, in which Guy undergoes a change of heart because circumstances force him to empathize with these people instead of objectifying them as targets. His situation is complicated because Vera buys into the poisoned macho logic and refuses to nurse or care for the baby. The story arrives at a point where her own father hands her a gun and expects her to shoot herself.