Rating: ***1/2A lot of people get the lion’s share of the credit for ending the Cold War: Ronald Regan, Mikhail Gorbachev, even Ronald McDonald. But what about Colonel Ryszard Kuklinsk? Who? you're asking. Kuklinsk was a high ranking officer in the Polish army, one of their best actually with dozens of citations to his name. But he was also a traitor. To some people anyway, nearly as many think he’s a national hero that laid aside nationalism for the sake of not just the free world, but for the entirety of mankind as well. War Games and the Man Who Stopped Them is Kuklinsk’s story, one that unfortunately he didn’t get a chance to contribute too.
No, that’s not foreshadowing of a sinister end to Kuklinsk, but that wasn’t altogether certain considering that one night in 1981 when he and his family had to flee Warsaw for fear of him being discovered as an American spy. Kuklinsk was a decorated officer and pride of the Polish military, but he was a humanist too. Upon seeing the Warsaw Pact plans in anticipation for an invasion of Western Europe, up to and including the use of the nuclear option, Kuklinsk said to himself that enough was enough. He turned spy for the Americans and over several years provided valuable intelligence that might have hastened the collapse of the Soviet block.
A combination of memoir, docudrama and spy thriller, War Games chronicles Kuklinsk’s nearly decade long service as a double agent, his tragic retirement in Florida and his eventful return to Warsaw that where people came out to welcome him and lynch him in equal measure. It’s a weird, wild story that spans across the worlds of international espionage and family heartbreak. Director Dariusz Jabłoński gives the film both a personal touch and a journalistic distance. That’s not an easy task, but Jabłoński’s personal relationship with Kuklinsk before his death is tempered by the fact that the man’s death offers some remoteness to the subject material.
Treading in the grey waters of international intelligence gathering, there’s plenty to get the paranoid-turned mind going with visits to facilities and ceremonies so secret that there’s no filming allowed lest there be exposure for the active C.I.A. agents inside. Not that this is some James Bond action piece, this is the real nuts and bolts of spy work in all its unglamorous glory. But this is a story about a man who was accidentally a spy, a man struck by conscience and with the courage and guile to accept that his actions may have led to no happy ending for himself. Terse and mechanical, yet still loving and personal, War Games is a great tribute to not just Kuklinsk, but to unsung heroes that influence events bigger than themselves all the time.
