ThiefHott Too much of everything

GurlyIamBeach Instant Favorite.

LouHomey From my favorite movies..

Frances Chung Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

kevin-caprani This was released on DVD a while back and i purchased it on the recommendation of a friend, who knew i liked callan , i have to say this stands up very well in comparison both in tension and quality of script acting and storyline,this is nothing like The professionals for example, no flashy action scenes no uptempo background music to set the scene, its gritty and real, dialogue plot and excellent casting make this compelling viewing, its as good as say secret army another taught gripping drama of quality that was all about fighting the enemy while avoiding detection, a tragedy then that its creator and writer Ian Mackintosh disappeared in a light aircraft crash with two other passengers in 1979 over the gulf of alaska a fourth series was being written, yorkshire television believed that without mackintosh the quality would be compromised and that it was best to end the production, in retrospect the right decision the three series we have stand head and shoulders above any other espionage thriller drama before or since, {in my opinion of course}

michaelj108 The best line in all the episodes is in the first one, titled "First Principles." The odious Neil Burnside flies to Oslo only to rebuke his Norwegian colleague face-to-face with a short, sharp lecture delivered at the boarding gate of the airplane, brusk and aggressive as Burnside nearly always is, on what it takes to succeed in the Cold War. Burnside says the Norwegians must learn more about how intelligence works and that takestime. His Norwegian counterpart protests that there was no time and action was necessary. Action was taken and it ended disastrously. "If you want James Bond, go to the library," Burnside replies. Hasty action gets good agents killed as it did in this case. If you want success then do the hard, boring, endless, tedious, and detailed work of preparation. Read maps, study weather patterns, train and train again, learn languages, stockpile equipment that may never be used, argue over budgets to do these tasks, guard against cost-cutting pressures, consider every possible and few impossible alternatives, and then start over. Most of all jealously preserve the capacity to take action from the most insidious and constant threat against the capacity to act and that is the office politics of any large organization, the competition for resources, for recognition, for promotion, for one's ideas, and so on.That brief dialogue sets the theme for most of the rest of the Sandbaggers where the focus is first on securing the Sandbaggers in the dangerous and ruthless world of Whitehall. In Whitehall it makes sense to send assassins economy class on long international flights and expect them to do the killing efficiently and secretly and return economy class. That is far cheaper. One of Burnside's recurrent fights is over budget for exactly such needs as first class travel for the Sandbaggers who do the killing. (There is no point in hiding behind metaphors like "dirty work" or "heavy lifting" because mostly the Sandbaggers kill. If anything less than murder was required, someone else could do it.) Anyone working in an organization knows all of this to be true, and "The Sandbaggers" is on this score one of the most realistic television programs ever made. It is all about budget most of the time.

kwking I bought the dvd's after reading raves about this on the internet. The series keeps your attention through each well written and acted episode. It's major flaw is that unlike the best spy shows from an earlier era, the politics aren't so grey. The mistrust and disloyalties only hint at uneasy conclusions but are ultimately neatly wrapped up and one-sided. Not surprising I suppose for a series leading us into the Reagan-Thatcher years. It makes me cringe when people compare this to John LeCarre. "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" is precisely what this is not. Though it might have been less realistic, Secret Agent was braver (and better). Still, it's worth a rental.

matthewbayan A previous commenter noted that the series seemed to end abruptly and wondered if our British friends were holding out on us. The reality is that the series was supposed to continue for at least another season, but there was one problem: the producer/writer of the series died at the end of the first season. This was one of those rare situations where the originator of the series also wrote all of the episodes. That intimacy with the characters and the ability to weave various plot lines over multiple episodes was one of the characteristics that made Sandbaggers so enjoyable. But it also made it vulnerable to disaster because only the producer/writer knew all the plot lines he had planned for the second season. Most of that was in his head. With few notes to go on, the production company staff found it impossible to figure out what to do with the series, so the second season was never produced. It's a tragedy because Sandbaggers was so wonderfully done. We can only guess whether Willie survived and how Burnside dealt with his ex-wife.