High-def video pseudodocumentary, or if you prefer, humorless mockumentary, about some Marines in Samarra (John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra is de rigueur reading for one of them) who, in the line of duty, mow down a pregnant Muslim en route to the delivery room, and, in their leisure hours, rape and murder a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl. Just to hit the highlights. The "source material" consists principally of a fictitious video diary, which one of the leathernecks hopes will be his entrée into USC film school, and a fictitious French documentary with English subtitles, plus snippets of staged footage from security cameras and embedded journalists. Not to mention the authentically documentary photo montage at the end, to push your face into the war in case you weren't taking the film seriously enough, and to wrap it up in a cloak of sanctity. Brian De Palma, one of the few contemporary American filmmakers to possess a recognizable style (B-movie baroque), is willing here to give all that up for a semblance, a guise, a pretense, of Unvarnished Truth. There may be dabs and dribbles of lyrical artiness in the French documentary (a shot of a scorpion aswarm with ants, a cliché since the opening sequence of The Wild Bunch), but that can be blamed on the French. In the main, the handheld digital camera, corralling a pallid picture in a wavering frame, proves to be the same labor-saving device for De Palma as it is for the pre-eminent mockumentarist, Christopher Guest. Different for De Palma, though, is the expectation that the device will vouch for his veracity and his verisimilitude. In spite of the unfamiliar faces that make up the cast (Izzy Diaz, Patrick Carroll, Daniel Stewart Sherman, Rob Devaney), the naturalistic acting comes across as unnaturally actorish, and one wonders anew why it should be so difficult for actors to act natural. Any such shortcomings would of course be less of a drawback in a docucomedy, where, if the distortions do not actually enhance the comedy, they sabotage only laughs. They do not, as they do here, sabotage high dudgeon. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd
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