Operation Pope review – hard-bitten thriller about a true-life papal assassination plot

<p>Audiences will obviously be aware the secret plan to kill John Paul II did not succeed, but despite a baggy narrative the high-stakes espionage is still compelling</p><p>‘You 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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Pope_John_Paul_II">the 1981 attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II</a>. 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.</p><p>True life stories have a way of being a bit messier and wrinklier than their fictional counterparts, leaving scriptwriters with some decisions to make around how much to tidy up a set of events to suit the narrative demands of fiction. For around the first hour of this film, Bruno’s mission isn’t actually to shoot the pope, it’s to shoot the man who shoots the pope. Unbeknownst to the assassin, Bruno is supposed to be lurking to tidy up the loose ends and actually takes quite a bit of time to make it to the point where Bruno gets to say: “You want me to shoot the pope?”, which in a glossy Hollywood version would probably happen somewhere in the first 10 minutes.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/oct/10/operation-pope-review-hard-bitten-thriller-about-a-true-life-papal-assassination-plot">Continue reading...</a>