WOLF RUN

Free-lance spy-turned-photographer Gordon Gallagher (Villiger, Naja) sets his supercharged, all-wheel-drive Audi in pursuit of his fiancÇe's murderers. Gorbachev was unknown and anti-lock braking was not standard equipment when this thriller first appeared in the UK in 1984. Gallagher's passion for his automobile can prove distracting at times—for example, when he gives it the name of his assassinated sweetheart—but it is a very fast and very reliable machine, and the Afro-British Gallagher is otherwise perfectly sound. This adventure finds him on a skiing holiday with ravishing, splendidly rich Lauren Tanner, whom he loves and whom he plans to marry—until on a steep downhill run she falls victim to a sniper's bullet. Someone is wiping out all the survivors of the airplane hijacking that brought Lauren and Gallagher together, and indeed there was a less skillfully aimed bullet meant for Gallagher himself. Controlling his wild grief rather quickly, Gallagher enlists the help of his pretty attending physician to spot the killers and then zooms off in pursuit in his magnificent motorcar. Soon he is running bad guys off the road all the way across Europe. It is not enough that he find out who pulled the triggers; Gallagher wants to know who paid them and why—questions he asks of his old colleagues in the UK. The answers lie in Zaire—where a callous munitions-maker is peddling cruise missiles to the locals and where it would be much too expensive to ship the Audi. Gallagher must make do with rentals. Smooth but undistinguished action-adventure.