The Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) filed an indictment for a massacre perpetrated during the Croatian War against Croatian Colonel Skoka. The only people who could contradict the indictment and testify that Skoka was with them in another location during the war crime, soldiers Joso and Mato, have vanished. Since Skoka is considered a hero among Croatian population, the government sends manipulator Antiša to hire peasant Ante and a Serb from Banja Luka, Duško, who look identical as Joso and Mato, and thus play the two witnesses who will testify and get paid 20,000€ each. They do, the prosecutor thus has to drop the indictment against Skoka, but then an indictment against Joso and Mato is filed. Reluctantly, Ante and Duško accept to go to jail at the Hague for 8 years for an even bigger salary, and to take Joso's and Mato's punishment.
Dejan Sorak's black comedy "Two players from the Bench" has an almost "Simpsons"-like crazy idea of the Croatian government "cheating" in its cooperation with the Hague-based war crimes Tribunal around that time, by hiring two "doubles" who will play witnesses and then demolish the indictment of a popular Croatian war hero (arguably an analogy of Ante Gotovina), yet the movie needed much better writing, execution, inspiration and more humor to edge itself into something better. With an overlong running time of 112 minutes, the movie definitely needed a better editor to remove some "empty walk", especially since too much time is spent in the first half on Ante and Dusko just hiding in the abandoned warehouse and rehearsing their "roles" from the script, whereas the subplot involving a Ukrainian prostitute who befriends Ante could have been either removed or rewritten to play a role in the story later on. Some of the best jokes are when the secret agents are "modeling" Ante and Dusko to look exactly like the Croatian soldiers Joso and Mato, even making photos of them near a pit, ostensibly from the war time, yet in a diner, Antisa insists that Dusko needs to lose a specific tooth, since his "clone" Mato also has a missing tooth. Cue Ante punching Dusko in the jaw, who falls on the ground but indeed finds out that he lost that specific tooth. When Antisa mentions that Joso also had a scar on his cheek, Dusko jokingly offers himself to give Ante a scar for free. In the preliminary hearing sequence, when he blunders and casts doubt that he is Mato, Dusko randomly just smiles and points with his finger at his missing tooth, almost as a "ace in the sleeve". While somewhat clumsy and underwritten, the movie is a sly contemplation on the illusion of justice and the "big fish" hiding behind small people.
Grade:++
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