| Red Mercury | |
| Cinematography: | Uday Tiwari |
| Editing: | Jeremy Gibbs |
| Country: | United Kingdom |
| Runtime: | 113 minutes |
| Language: | English |
| Budget: | £2,000,000 UK (est.) |
Red Mercury is a 2005 British film thriller directed by Roy Battersby and starring Stockard Channing, Pete Postlethwaite, Juliet Stevenson, Ron Silver and David Bradley.
The film is a thriller about a terrorist kidnapping.[1] Three Islamist terrorist bomb-makers have just obtained some red mercury, a semi-mythical explosive. They get a tipoff that their safehouse is about to be raided and they flee on foot from the police. In an attempt to escape they kidnap hostages in a Greek restaurant in London and threaten to detonate a bomb containing the titular explosive. Eventually they are defeated and the hostages are saved and the film ends.[2]
The film was written, produced and filmed over a four-month period.[2]
The film was the first film aimed for a Western audience produced by a new film production company named Inspire, that planned to apply Bollywood film production methods to films made in the United Kingdom:[2]
According to the producers the writer, Farrukh Dhondy, was interviewed by British counter-terrorism officials, to verify that the bomb-plot in the script was unrelated to their active investigations.[3]
The film was sold at the 2005 Cannes Film Market. It was released in the UK shortly after the 7 July 2005 London bombings, rendering its theme of Islamic terrorism particularly topical.[4] It was screened at the Cleveland International Film Festival in 2006.[5] It did not have a theatrical release in the US, being released to DVD in June 2007.
Variety compared it to Dog Day Afternoon and Juggernaut, as a socially-committed thriller with more talk than action. Their critic praised the technical values and performances, but found some of the plotting to be "sloppy" and "forced" with some characters "underwritten".[6] Jack G Shaheen criticised it for the "one-dimensional" portrayal of the villains.[4]