Awful

Rating: 1/10 (27 March 2001)

I thought that this was a very bad movie. However, enough has been written about that. What is really stupid, though, is the complaints I'm reading about the accents. The Brit accent is fine, as long as everyone in the movie sticks to it. When a Russian speaks to a Russian in real life, they don't speak with a Russian accent. The accent would be regional, and the star of the movie would probably have a 'lower class' accent.
The director chose to use a British accent to convey the class differences.To have given everyone a false Russian accent would have stunted the actors' performances and made the dialogue much more robotic, as well as difficult to follow.
This is a complete red herring, which distracts from the awfulness of the screenplay.