Operation Pope review – hard-bitten thriller about a true

‘Y ou want me to shoot the pope?” This is undeniably a fab jumping off point for a any film, based on real events or not, and in fact this gritty Polish thriller is a dramatisation of the 1981 attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II . But you don’t need to be much of a history buff to know that that this particular crime would be on the JFK level of momentousness if it had actually succeeded. As it is, we follow Bogusław Linda as Konstanty “Bruno” Brusicki, a former intelligence agent who is offered a compelling carrot and threatened with a nasty stick by the men who want PJP2 dead. Brusicki has also been diagnosed with terminal cancer, which in the view of the conspiracists makes him the perfect murderer; they won’t have to subsequently get rid of him to cover their tracks.

True life