It's an enjoyably tense television movie. Written by Frderick Forsythe, it has little action in it but a good deal of suspense. Forsythe has the peculiar characteristic of being able to invest small details with interest, especially technical details and complicated identity scams. This, being a TV movie, is going to lack much in the way of that talent and concentrates instead on simple intrigues and mysteries, some of which are left unexplained. People come and go, lying to and cheating one another, but it's not high drama and it's not witty.The MacGuffin here is some formula for a super antibiotic, as if we didn't have enough antibiotics. It winds up by accident in Rod Taylor's hands and the head honcho of the biggest, most villainous corporation you ever heard of wants it back. That accident, by the way, involves a light airplane crashing directly into Taylor's cottage on the Kerry coast and killing his wife and two children. It's made clear at the opening that Taylor is an ex Green Beret but that plays little part in the narrative until the ridiculous ending.It may be one of Taylor's best performances, TV movie or not. He's aged, like a good wine. No longer the confident, tanned young hero of "The Birds", he's now a little puffy and from some angles looks uncannily like Robin Williams. By the time of "Welcome to Woop Woop," he was a goggle-eyed caricature of his former handsome self but it didn't bother him and it was a viewer's delight.Joanna Petit has held up well. In fact -- pretty well indeed. Her role, though, is a stereotype, the ambitious female reporter. Didn't Dirty Harry get saddled with one of them somewhere along the line of sequels? The script is functional but lacks poetry. The location shooting in Ireland is just fine and County Kerry is just as I remember it -- rainy, with "sun breaks." At the climax, the film implodes. Characters change their personalities for reasons of the utmost stupidity. Here's the grim villain who does the wet work, combing the grassy wind-swept hills, looking to kill Taylor who is hiding somewhere among the brush. This dedicated assassin has always been a cool customer, dressed in black, silent, full of self control. But now he must cold cock one of his partners in a fit of pique, which is stupid. Then, unable to determine Taylor's hiding place in the grassy hills and the furze bushes, he whirls around wildly, firing his pistol in all directions until he's out of ammunition. He runs until he's exhausted. Taylor corners him and the villain drops to his knees, sobbing and begging for mercy. Right.There is one gem of a performance in the movie. Cyril Cusack's police detective. The role, like that of the reporter, the head honcho and his goons, is a cliché. Cusack shows up once in a while to politely inform Taylor to keep his nose out of police business, forget about revenge, and let the cops do their jobs. But Cusack turns his appearances into something that brightens the whole show. He was equally good in another Forsythe story, "The Day of the Jackal." Not the revolting remake, but the original.

I've liked Rod Taylor ever since I saw him in Hitchcock's "The Birds" (arguably his most famous role ever) - a sort of "everyman" version of the classic leading men of Hitchcock like Cary Grant. But he must have been going through a dry spell in his career when he agreed to make this little time-waster. Shot in a totally flat style that screams TV-movie, "Cry Of The Innocent" is mostly dull, when it's not unintentionally funny (check out that editing trick near the end to convince us of Taylor's "camouflage" skills!). Taylor himself walks through the film, and Joanna Pettet is not around long enough to help much. Another problem is the very poor sound recording - at least a third of the dialogue is hard to hear. About the only interesting point of the film is that it reflects the post-Vietnam era disillusionment of Americans (though it was shot in Ireland) towards big international corporations. * out of 4.

While it is set up with an interesting premise, a man losing his family as collateral damage caused by some spy stuff, this starts strongly and then just fizzles. The character played by Rod Taylor is so dull. He seems to recover from an incredible tragedy very quickly, then finds himself embroiled in espionage and a need to avenge the event. There are a series of connections that he must make and finally face the person at the top. This could have been OK but its so tiringly dull. There are encounters, handled so incompetently by the bad guys, that he is allowed to roam free. Anyone who is involved in the upper levels of this type of crime would have taken one of many opportunities to just finish him off. Obviously, there is the ubiquitous briefcase, but we don't even know what that's all about. It's so obvious when a film is made for TV with so little effort to fill in the spaces. Taylor is apparently a Green Beret, but there is so little character development that we don't get in his head at all. Could have been good. Isn't.

This is an Irish film that premiered on American TV back in 1980. It's nothing special. It's a conspiracy story involving industrial spying and a plane from Rome that crashes in Ireland: certainly elements that you could see coming from the pen of Frederick Forsyth. It's Rod Taylor's family that is wiped out in the plane crash and, outraged at discovering that it was no accident, he finds a way to gain revenge on the people behind it. Taylor plays an American insurance exec in Ireland, but of course that isn't a position with enough muscle and craftiness, so the writers also provide him with a background as a former Green Beret. This gives him filmic license to be as sharp and as deadly as they come. Guess those villains picked the wrong family to accidentally wipe out---now they've got an angry Rod to deal with. Actually, Taylor's character and most of the others are cliché (including Pettet as the intrepid female reporter---yawn). But there IS one actor and character that stands out: Cyril Cusack as the Irish police inspector. His rumpled, calm and casual, yet brilliant inspector is the best thing in the film. He steals every scene. Too bad nothing further (another movie or even a TV series) was done with this delightful character. It's the one thing to recommend in this otherwise ordinary revenge saga.