AllMovie

A man who thinks that he's on a mission of mercy finds himself in the middle of international espionage at its most dangerous in this thriller. Father Andrew Kanevsky (Martin Sheen) is a Catholic priest who persuades his brother Vince (Chris Penn) to join him as he travels to Russia to do missionary work with a group of Franciscan priests in St. Petersburg. Or at least that's what Vince thinks when they take off; as it turns out, Father Andrew is involved in a cloak-and-dagger scheme with the Franciscans to smuggle $200 million in religious relics out of Russia and into the U.S. before a group of Neo-Nazi terrorists who have overrun the city can lay claim to them. However, the terrorists are not easily foiled, and Father Andrew is captured and killed by their number; when Vince learns the truth about his brother's mission from Father Stanislav (J.T. Walsh), he's determined to see that the holy icons find their way to the U.S. as planned, even after two renegades split off from the terrorist faction and make off with the valuables on their own. Sacred Cargo was the first English-language feature for former Soviet playwright Aleksandr Buravsky, who also cowrote the screenplay.