Amiable, amusing anti-Americanism, in the form of a spoof of a WWII military training film, “declassified” under the Freedom of Information Act. Black-and-white Hollywood war films of the period, featuring the likes of William Holden, Alan Ladd, Arthur Kennedy, Lloyd Nolan, and Ronald Reagan, some of whom have been obviously redubbed, are mixed in with a not exactly matching black-and-white pastiche featuring Patrick Muldoon, Mackenzie Astin, Elizabeth Bennett, and John Rixey Moore, all of whom have been well coached, and all of whom are game. Modern anachronisms infiltrate the stiff-upper-lip dialogue and the stentorian narration to make plain that the writer and first-time director Dale Kutzera is thinking of a more up-to-date war (“Raise our threat level from Orange to Tangerine,” “Lower our threat level from Butterscotch to Autumn Harvest”). Which, whether by design or by accident, opens up an unpalatable can of worms. One of these worms would be the implicit sameness of the American psyche, then as now, and another would be the implicit equivalence of the Second World War and the invasion of Iraq. You might go so far as to swallow the one without going that far with the other. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd
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