After his flight attendant daughter is taken hostage by a group of German terrorists, basketball coach Paul Hobart (Brian Dennehy) grows frustrated with government red tape and heads to Germany to track her down and save her himself.  Realizing that he doesn’t have the experience necessary to do it all on his own, Paul hires Vickers (Anthony Valentine), a shady and ruthless former SAS man who will do whatever is necessary to get the job done.  Joanna Cassidy plays Paul’s wife.  Ron Silver plays the journalist who sees the opportunity to break a great story as Paul searches for his daughter.

A Father’s Revenge is a slow-moving thriller.  I was surprised to discover that it was actually given a theatrical release because everything about it feels like a made-for-television movie.  It’s a predictable movie.  At first, Paul is reluctant to embrace Vickers’s more extreme methods but then he sees that those methods are the only ones that work when dealing with terrorists.  As usual, Dennehy is ideally cast as a beer-drinking, blue collar American and the underused Joanna Cassidy has a few good emotional scenes as his wife.  The movie is stolen by Anthony Valentine, who brings a note of ambiguity to Vickers’s motivations.  The main problem with the movie is that it spends too much time on scenes of people debating what they should do and not enough time showing them actually doing it.  The finale is exciting but it takes too long to get there.