The devil knows his own

To be fair, I never intended to choose a Russian action movie to start off a new year. It happened more or less accidentally and, for sheer boredom, I almost stopped watching after the first five minutes, but I'm glad I didn't. Terrorists held a houseful of theater audience hostage and it immediately brought back memories of the real life Moscow theater hostage crisis in 2002 and Die Hard (1988), but instead of Bruce Willis crawling through elevator shafts, the hero of the day is a history teacher Alla Nikolaevna (Irina Kupchenko) who educates to fuck out of the terrorists, hostages and the people watching the movie.