Good concept, poorly executed.

Absolutely brilliant

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Another shot of Dolphine straight to the system.Pentathalalogram is a movie about swimming, surprisingly, and there are no bullets.However, there are: swimming pools, water, treading water, the butterfly and the backstroke and bathing suits and diving boards but nobody dives.Dolph here plays Dolph who plays a swimmer who gets chased by his former coach because he is just so awesome and swimmy that his coach falls in love with him in a nice way and stuff.Unfortunately, Dolph does not explode any aliens in this one or decapitate any children but hey, you gotta take the wheat with the chaff and this is pretty chaffy.Pentagram/Rhombus

The funniest thing about this movie is that the story may seem implausible actually happened in REAL life. Read the book "Tod dem Verraeter" (2000) by Heribert Schwan. It tells the TRUE story of olympic athlete, Lutz Eigendorf, who escapes East Germany and is tracked down allegedly by Stasi and murdered. This movie seems like a bad joke by comparison.The movie requires a LOT from Dolph Lundgren in terms of acting and poor Dolph is just TERRIBLE here. It's a truly cringe worthy experience . Lundgren tries extremely hard to make the part credible but he fails and gives one of worst performances in his career. David Soul who plays the villain is also INCREDIBLY ANNOYING. Overall , the acting in the whole movie is awful."Pentathlon" is full of stupidities, full of logic and historical holes (Nazis don't have anything in common with Stasi ! ) , full of clichés and stereotypes (a completely unrealistic portrait of what life was like in East Germany ). Lack of action, a poor story and horrible dialogs. It doesn't work as a drama , even less as action movie. I admire Lundgren's ambition , but this movie simply sucks. The training sequences and the bantering with Roger E. Mosley as Creese was somewhat fun. However it can't save this movie. Better watch "Rocky". Director/writer Bruce Malmuth has made an good action movie before – "Nighthawks" with Sylvester Stallone and Rutger Hauer. Better watch that movie instead of this crap. I give it 1/10.

Has there EVER been a Hollywood film that criticises or even challenges the assumption that the United States is the greatest most noble most selflessly benevolent country to have ever existed on Planet Earth? I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that EVERY single Hollywood film i have ever seen propagates - to a greater or lesser extent, either implicitly or explicitly - such myths. And, surprise surprise, "Pentathlon" is no exception.Yes, once again, the bogeyman is Caaaaamunism, this time in the shape of the former German Democratic Republic, as Yankee meathead Dolph Lundgren stars as an East German pentathlete who ends up escaping from the evil clutches of the nasty old GDR, by defecting to the good old Land of the Free and Home of the Brave (don't laugh!) during the '88 Seoul Olympics.I mean, it says a lot about the US film industry, that even in 1994 (when this appalling film was made) they just couldn't resist the temptation to drag the memory of Communism through the dirt some more. The truth of course is that, while the former Communist regimes of the Eastern Bloc were far from perfect, they did provide a substantial social safety net for their people in terms of relatively good working conditions, pensions, free health care, free education (including at university level!), affordable housing, etc, etc. The destruction of this social safety net since the collapse of Communism has resulted in widespread misery across Eastern Europe, particularly in the former Soviet Union itself, where at least 3 million are estimated to have died as a direct result of the wiping out of the old Soviet welfare state.In response to my comments here, the apologists for western capitalist imperialism will no doubt point to the likes of those who were killed whilst trying to flee across the Berlin Wall from East to West. To those people i would say the following: Firstly, how many people were actually killed in such circumstances during the lifetime of the wall (1961-1989)? Answer: 171. While terrible (as any deaths are), this number pales into insignificance when compared with (to pick just one example from the many available), say, the number of Afghan civilians killed during the US bombardment of that country in late 2001 (scholarly estimates put the figure at at least 3,700). The difference is, of course, that the US capitalist ruling class cares passionately about civilian death when it can be used as a stick to beat Communism with, yet remains blissfully nonchalant about civilian death when it occurs as "collateral damage" during one of the countless wars of US imperial expansion. And it can hardly be argued that the US ruling class at least cares about its own people. How many have perished as a result of the perennial refusal to go against the interests of the Health Insurance industry lobby by establishing a free national health service for America? How many have perished as a result of the relentless attacks on welfare support since the late 70s? And this is before you've even mentioned things like Huricane Katrina, or the small matter of whatever happened to the Native Americans (can genocide only be something that the Nazis did to the Jews?).Now the supporters of American Imperialism here might well still argue that surely the very fact that people attempted to escape across the Berlin Wall from East to West, demonstrates just how repressive the GDR regime was. Well actually, all it demonstrates is how much more affluent life in West Berlin was. Such a point is hardly controversial. Everybody knows that capitalist First World societies have a lot of wealth. What fewer people appreciate is that most of this wealth comes from the intensive exploitation by western corporations of cheap industrial and agricultural labour in the West's neo-colonies in the Third World. The Eastern Bloc (on principle) had no such neo-colonial relationships with Third World countries (Cuba, for example, sold sugar to the USSR at six times the market value, because the USSR believed in helping Third World countries rather than exploiting them). As a result, of course life in East Berlin was grim and grey and austere compared to West Berlin - a fact the US exploited to the hilt by pumping more and more money into West Berlin, effectively dangling the consumer lifestyle before the eyes of the East Berliners. "Anything", in the words of an internal CIA memo since declassified, "to make the Commies look bad". The idea, of course, was to bleed the GDR of its productive population, and thus bring the Communist state to its knees. With the end of the GDR, western big business could look forward to the opening up of vast new labour and consumer markets to exploit. This was always the goal of the US anti-Communist strategy. As with the more recent example of the Iraq War, it was never anything to do with "spreading democracy" (capitalists do not know the meaning of the term). On the contrary, it was everything to do with advancing the economic interests of the mega-rich US big business ruling class.And finally, why is it that apologists for western imperialism have a problem with a wall built in Berlin to keep Western spies out, yet have no problem whatsoever with a wall built in the Occupied Territories to keep poor Palestinians out of the luxurious villas of the Israeli colonists, nor with a proposed wall built along the Rio Grande to keep poor Mexicans out of the US? In fact, isn't every anti-immigration law enacted by a rich western state effectively a wall? It appears that, for the imperialist apologists, some walls are more equal than others.For an honest view of the history of the German Democratic Republic, i strongly recommend you read Mary Fulbrook's excellent 2004 book, "The People's State". Don't expect films like "Pentathlon" to tell you the truth!!

I found this movie a big disappointment. This is sad because it has good actors, good production values and a fine plot. But after awhile it just becomes another dull thriller that runs out of ideas. Dolph is the German gold medalist in the pentathlon who flees to America to get away from his mad Nazi coach (David Soul). Some years later, his coach comes after him and the action starts. David Soul is very good as the coach, and plays the part menacingly and convincingly. Dolph is very good in his role too, and gives one of his best performances ever. There are some good action scenes, but apart from that the whole thing begins to go downhill. This was a pity considering it was released after the excellent Army Of One, which I think is Dolph's best movie by far. Pentathlon is still a good flick, just not as good as I expected. It's still a great movie to watch to kill time. Overall I would recommend you get Army Of One instead though, it's much better.