Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

According to the dedication at the end,This film was shot in the offices of The Times and used that papers' staff; in 1986, the time it was shot, the paper's proprietor, Rupert "Dirty Digger" Murdoch had just a bruising year-long strike in which he chased the print unions off site; obviously a condition of being allowed to film was that the film not have an anti-Tory slant; this explains why the "evil" British Government in the film is a Labour government and the disgraced plotician is in the Labour Party; in reality there hadn't been a Labour government in UK since 1979. Murdoch obviously would only allow the film to be made if it attacked the Labour Party (at the time led by Neil Kinnock)

***SPOILERS*** Hard to follow spy and cover-up movie about an incident at a US Air Force base in the English countryside that's loaded with nuclear missiles that the local population is totally unaware of. That's until a nuclear bomb laden US fighter plane almost crashed in trying to avoid a local runway from a juvenile detention center Steven Dyce, Steve Woodcock. Dyce was killed by th plane on the runway as he was trying to escape from the police with his friend Mickey Parker, Graham Fletcher Cook. That after the two tried to make their getaway in a stolen car.It's when member of Parliament, or MP for short, labor party bigwig Dennis Markham, Ian Bannen, started snooping around and trying to get to the bottom of what happened that he was exposed in not only cheating on his wife but having a tryst with a hooker named Marinda Court. It was Miss Court who was also involved with the East German military attaché in London Dietrich Kleist, Alexei Jawdokimov, who's also secretly working for the Soviet KGB! That has London tabloid reporter Nick Mullen, Gabriel Bryne, smell a big scoop and get on the story. It's Nick Mullen's friend at the tabloid Vernon Bayliss, Denholm Elliott, who smells a rat in this story and by getting in touch with Markham, who both were once members of the British Communist Party, who tells him that the entire story about his relationship with both Miss Court and Soviet Agent Klesit is pure BS or at least the Kleist part of it. Markham claims that it's really an attempt to cover up the Steven Dyce death and the circumstances surrounding it!It's after Vernon was mysteriously found dead from a heart attack in his London flat with it being ransacked that Mullen started to realize that the whole sex and spy thing about Markham was a red herring in order to keep the the real reason for trying to destroy Markhm's political career! It's really because of his investigation of the fatal accident that took young Steve Dyce's life! It's then that Mullen gets to work in uncovering what really happened to Dyce which leads to the highest members and most powerful of the British Government! Even higher then the Prime Minster at the time-in 1984-him or,in the person being Margaret Tatcher, herself! And at the same time puts Mullen as well as his partner in uncovering Dyce's death Markham's personal secretary Nina Beckman, Greta Scacchi, lives in serious jeopardy!Nothing really great here with the exception of the sexy Greta Scacchi getting a chance to show that she's as good an actress as a sex symbol. There's also actor Gabriel Brynes looking and acting like an Irish version of Al Pacino in the movie "Serpico" but in here playing an investigative reporter not an undercover New York plain clothes detective. P.S There's a photo in the movie that was faked up, by the members of the "Realm", to prove that Markham and Kleist actually knew each other in a photo shoot with Soviet Preimer Leonid Brezhnev taken in Prague in 1979. What we see is Markham and Kleist in the background looking like their good friends by them either winking or smirking at each other. What I noticed in the photo that was a lot more interesting and could have well proved the photo to be a fake is that in it was also the former Soviet Preimer Nikita Khrushchev! Khruschev was in fact dead, he died on Septemer 11, 1971, eight years before the photo was supposedly taken!

Beginning with the later years of the Cold War and extending to this very day, there has been this question about the enemies of a nation: are the ones within more dangerous then the external ones? This question has produced quite a few intriguing thrillers over the years and one such is Defence Of The Realm from 1986. This film looks at that question from the perspective of late Cold War UK politics and in turn presents a realistic yet tense thriller in the process.The film has a fine cast of some of the UK's best actors and character actors of the time. Leading the cast is Gabriel Byrne as reporter Nick Mullen who finds himself writing one story and then follows a trail of breadcrumbs that leads him to discovering he has in fact been used. That trail of breadcrumbs belongs to Mullen's colleague and mentor of sorts Vernon Bayliss in a BAFTA winning performance from Denholm Elliott who makes the most of a small part. Helping Mullen is Greta Scacchi as Nina Beckman, the assistant to a Parliament member (played by Ian Bannen) caught up in the events. They are aided by Bill Paterson as Mullen immediate boss and opposed by David Calder as the newspaper's editor and Fulton Mackay as the owner of the newspaper Mullen works for. Also in a small role is an early appearance from Robbie Coltrane as a fellow reporter in a few scenes. The result is that the film is well anchored by a fine cast.The film is helped out by the realism of the production values. This is especially true of the production design of Roger Murray-Leach who, working with what was likely a small budget, nonetheless created a whole plethora of sets ranging from newsrooms to a U.S Air Force base before taking us inside the secret halls of the government. Roger Deakins cinematography gives the film a sense of claustrophobia at all times even when the film ventures into wide open spaces. The result of this is amplified by the editing of Michael Bradsell and the score from Richard Harvey to create an almost continuous sense of menace throughout the film. All this comes together under the direction of David Drury to give the film a strong sense of realism.The production values though take that realism from the script by Martin Stellman. The script looks at the question mentioned in this review's opening and does so through the lens of late Cold War Britain. At a time when Cold War tensions were increasing and a good deal of the public clamored for the government to do something about it, the film looks at how far a government and its national security apparatus might go to prevent a scandal that could bring about just that. What appears to be just another sex scandal involving a high ranking member of the British Parliament who has ties to the Defence establishment ( that is itself is highly reminiscent of the 1963 Profumo affair) might in fact be covering up something that seems completely unrelated: a police chase of two escaped teenage prisoners that accidentally crossed over onto a U.S Air Force base sometime before. The script takes Mullen and those he encounters on a journey into the secret workings of the British government. As it reaches it climax the film asks an important question: when does a government's ability to protect secrets cross the line into becoming something much more darker, threatening and even criminal? By combining a fine cast, production values and a fine script Defence Of The Realm is able to create a realistic yet tense thriller. While it may be set and more or less about late Cold War UK politics, the film asks questions that are relevant today. All of these elements come together to make Defence Of The Realm far more then just another thriller and ever watchable nearly twenty-five years on from its original release.

Well put together, and it will not do your paranoia any good at all! (But then, if you're not a bit paranoid, there's something wrong with you!)Perhaps the characters could do with filling out a little, but on the whole, this is a very well-crafted thriller, to which you have to pay attention, as there are no big info-dumps or exposition: you have to work out a lot for yourself.