True story of a U.S. Ranger assault on a POW camp in the Philippines toward the end of the Second World War, though the first-person narrator, the leader of the assault, starts back a bit further: "In 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor...." John Dahl, the director, had had trouble enough coping with the bare-bones neo-noirs of Kill Me Again, Red Rock West, and The Last Seduction, and whatever skills he honed in that workshop are pretty well worn down on this grander scale: a three-ring circus that jumps back and forth between the arenas of the POWs, the Rangers, and the Filipino resistance. The initial overrating of the noirs, however, means that auteur-hungry critics will continue to go the extra mile to hunt down a laurel or two. To get there, they must pass through many miles of straightness, flatness, dullness, and corn, in the company of cardboard characters and second-tier actors (James Franco, Benjamin Bratt, Joseph Fiennes, and lessers). The sun-washed color, a step away from sepia, appears to be an attempt to impart a newsreel reality, but the actual newsreel footage of liberated POWs and their liberators throughout the closing credits makes you feel a little like James Agee, forever brandishing wartime documentaries as a club against the prettifications of Hollywood. That sort of tactic might have been ruled (even in Agee's day) inadmissible, had the filmmakers themselves not introduced the footage in evidence. Connie Nielsen, Marton Csokas, Mark Consuelos. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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