Siberia - Movie 2018

Siberia Official Trailer (2018) - Keanu Reeves
Saban Films
We watched this odd little film last night. Today I am musing about it and it pops into my head that it's a Greek tragedy! I couldn't tell you which one, but there are just so many elements that are, um, iconic? Is that the word I want? I dunno. I'll just tell you about it and you can decide for your own dang self.

Kean-o (that's what I call him because no matter how many times my oldest tells me, I can never remember how to pronounce his name. Besides, who cares? It's not like I going to be talking to anyone in his universe. Though now that we're on the subject, we should probably all just call him Neo. I mean that's when he first crossed my event horizon. 

Blue Diamonds

Anyway, as I was saying before I got distracted, Kean-o is trying to facilitate a transaction involving a dozen, giant blue diamond gemstones. I mean giant like one carat, not like 20 or something ridiculous, he just has a handful of healthy sized gems. Well, he would if his partner would show up, but he doesn't. Matter of fact he never shows. We never see him. Kean-o calls him every five minutes from a new cell-phone and leaves him a voicemail, a message that is never returned. Grrr (that's Russian for Hmmm), me thinks there's skullduggery afoot.

The meeting is in St. Petersburg and the sale is supposed to be for $50 million dollars. $50 million for a dozen gems works out to around four million each. That sounds a little steep, until you realize the dollar isn't worth what it used to be, and there are a heck of lot more people now with big piles of money (10 times as many billionaires now as they were in 2000) just itching for something to spend it on, so of course luxury items have skyrocketed. And then these stones are special, and to the right knucklehead that alone can make them worth a zillion times more than their nominal value.

The customer is not happy and Kean-o is in the hot seat, so he asks for two days to track down the diamonds. Any normal transaction, you would expect Kean-o to apologize and they would just say good bye. Somehow I suspect his thinking was influenced by the prospect of a multi-million dollar commission. How much? Gems are only worth about a quarter of their retail price. You can buy them wholesale for half of what the retailers charge, and the distributors probably get them from the miners for half of that. So depending on where they are getting them, how much skin they have in the game, and how many people there are between them and the source, it could be anywhere from one to seventy five percent. I'm going to say 25% because you are going to need that much money to support yourself in the rarefied atmosphere that your clientele inhabits. Probably split it with his partner. Might even be working for a retailer who has offered to split the profit on this very exquisite set of highly desirable blue diamonds that have been sitting in his vault for the last dozen years or so.

Rigid Cell Phone Faraday Cage**
(At 1:36:17 from the end on Netflix)

Naturally, Kean-o calls his partner and leaves a voicemail. Actually, the first thing he does is change phones. He's got a bunch of cell phones and a bunch of brand new pre-paid SIM cards (you can tell they are new because they are still in the credit-card sized cards they come in and Kean-o has to break them out of the card). Anyway, he breaks out a new phone and calls Pyotr and leaves a voicemail and then he puts his phone inside a container. From the way it is built and the careful way he stows the phone I surmise it's a Faraday cage. Okay, now we're being double paranoid. But he's waiting for a call from his partner, and inside that box that phone isn't going to be receiving any phone calls. Bit of a dilemma there. He calls Pyotr repeatedly throughout the movie. Pyotr never answers. Matter of fact, we never see him. Kean-o believes he exists, so we do to.

Now he gets a message that Pyotr is in Mirny which is in the middle of Siberia. Kean-o hires a private jet to take him there. Pyotr's brother works in a mine there. Kean-o waits by the gate for him to get off work. We see a scene of a large industrial complex, looks like an oil refinery. Well cool, another big industrial establishment I didn't know existed. That used to bother me, finding out about giant stuff I had never heard of, but I've gotten used to it. There's a new one popping up every day. 

Mirny Open Pit Diamond Mine and Adjacent Airport

Mirny Open Pit Diamond Mine

So I go look up Mirny on Google Maps to see if I can find any sign of this giant industrial complex in the middle of Siberia, and it's not there. There is, however, a giant frigging hole in the ground. Looks like asteroid strike except there's no damage, no upheaval, just a big whole in the ground. Looks suspiciously like some kind of evil Cold War era defense project, but it's not. It's a diamond mine. I'll be durned.

Back to our story, Andrei, Pyotr's brother, doesn't know where Pyotr is either, but assures us that he will be back in couple of days. So our rich American gets acquainted with the locals - a gang of rowdy's who take him bear hunting. They all have big fancy bolt-action rifles. They give Kean-o a single shot rifle , one like you might give a kid who is learning to shoot. After making an series of jokes about how they have the big guns they eventually give him a bullet for his gun. Bullet, cartridge, don't quibble, I'm trying to tell a story here. 

He also gets acquainted, biblically, with the waitress at the local diner. Can't say as I blame her. Fancy foreigner shows up in their podunk little town, of course people are going to be interested. She's of marrying age, too, so probably more susceptible to sexual urges.

Now it transpires that there are several other players in this game and another near identical set of blue diamonds, but this other set is fake. However they aren't fake like the ones you buy at the five and dime, these are also genuine diamonds, but they are manufactured diamonds. Presumably the original set are natural diamonds. These diamonds are so good the only way they can be told apart is via a spectroscopic examination.

Pyotr sold the fake diamonds to one of these other players, some dude called Samasov and he has discovered the deception and isn't too happy about it. You know, that might explain why we haven't heard from Pyotr.

Kean-o goes back to St. Petersburg and goes through Pyotr's old hotel room, again. This time he finds a pistol hidden under the false bottom of a suitcase. And then he notices a fat blue candle on the counter. Wait a minute, that candle looks just like the one in the Gorynch Guest House* in Mirny where he  was supposed to meet Pyotr. I mean, what are the odds? Apply boot heel to candle, it crumples, and looky there, a little red velvet parcel that contains one real blue diamond. Well, it there's something in this candle, might there be something in the other one? So he calls the waitress who brings him the other candle. Sure, enough, there is another velvet wrapped parcel inside, but this one doesn't contain any gemstones. If I recall correctly, it holds a map to a farm outside Mirny. So back to Mirny we go. Well, not quite yet.

First we have to deliver the gemstone to the customer. He tells his girl he will be back in couple of hours, but she can't sit still. She notices that he has written the address on a notepad, so she goes there as well. To consummate the deal, the customer wants to become like blood brothers with Kean-o, so he asks? suggests? demands? that the two girls give them blowjobs. His girl with give Kean-o a blowjob and the waitress will blow the customer. And the two guys must look into each other's eyes. Kean-o is reluctant, but the waitress has no qualms. Maybe she realizes what's at stake, or maybe just hanging out in this rarefied atmosphere has made her horny. In any case, the girls perform, heads bobbing dutifully, but the scene is not in the least erotic. I'm not quite sure why that is. Is it the hostility, the reluctance, or the small group of onlookers? And what would bring a person participate in such a scene? Well, Kean-o has two reasons: the potential enormous payoff and, hey, blowjob. But why is the customer instigating it? Probably because he has the urge and he has enough money to indulge his whims. Who knows what kind of whims you might want to indulge if you suddenly got a billion dollars.

There was another movie with Viggo Mortensen that had similar scene. Viggo was undercover cop who had wormed his way into the Russian Mafia so far that they are going to make him a 'made man', or the Russian equivalent. But before the boss will proceed, he has to know that Viggo isn't queer, so he takes him to a whorehouse where he has to fuck one of the girls while the boss is watching. So now I'm wondering if this a real thing, or they just wanted to put some sex in the movie but by populating the scene with Russians we can pretend that only foreigners are weirdos and nobody we know would actually do anything like that. Yeah, right.

There's some emotional fallout from this, but our happy couple deal with it and head back to their hotel. Where they run into the FSB (successor to the KGB). There's a couple of brutes standing in the lobby . He asks the clerk if there are any messages for room 701 and the clerk warns Kean-o that 'they' are waiting for him upstairs. It would have helped if I knew if his room was actually 701, but it doesn't matter because he walks right in. They separate them and tell Kean-o that they have the fake diamonds and they want him to sell them to his customer - or else. I'm not sure what the 'or else' was. In any case it's enough to persuade Kean-o to agree.

When he shows up to make the sale, the customer has brought a jeweler with a spectroscope. The jeweler has some trouble with some cables, Kean-o makes a remark, the operator gets flustered and customer dismisses him. Now he is trusting Kean-o that the diamonds are real, and Kean-o doesn't flinch, even though he knows he is probably signing his own death warrant. Those fake diamonds are still diamonds, but once you get into this oxygen deprived atmosphere logic and reason have no effect. They might be worth 90% of the real ones, but that 10% is still five million bucks. In this case though money probably has no bearing. They are 'blood brothers' and Kean-o lied. If Kean-o wants to save his skin, he better get on a plane back to America and do it pronto.

But we can't do that. We have to have the final shootout. He travels back to Mirny where he enlists the band of bear hunters to go with him to this farm (the farm on the map that he found in the candle that his girl brought him from Mirny). When they get there they find the brother, Andrei, dead, sitting in the outhouse. He has several injuries. I'm not sure whether he died of a drug overdose and he's just been sitting there for while and the critters have got to him, or whether he was tortured. Don't matter, he's dead. The house is old and worn, but somebody has been living there. The prop department botched the front door though. It's a simple door made out of planks, but there are gaps between the planks, gaps that you can see  light through. That door isn't going to keep out the cold, and,  in case you forgot, Siberia is cold in the winter. So, bad door, but otherwise the house was just what you might expect of a farmhouse that's been there for a hundred years.

So the house is lived in, but no Pyotr, so we sit down to wait. It doesn't take long for the bad guys to show up. The bear hunters have left Kean-o a rifle and a box of shells and once the bad guys show up he starts making effective use of it. He's shooting and knocking them down, one after another and you think maybe he will get out of this. I mean, the odds are low, there's only one of him and there's good half dozen bad guys. On the other hand it's a movie, and he's Kean-o, the savior of the world, he might pull it off. No such luck. The customer's head thug walks up behind him and shoots him in the back and that's it for Kean-o.

* There's a real Gorynych Guest House but it's not in Mirny. 

** I looked for a rigid cell phone faraday cage, but all I could find were bags. I wonder if cases ever were a thing, or whether I'm just not looking under the right rocks.

P.S. Short video about helicopters and the mine.