...an old-school shoot-em-up with clear-cut villains to boo and clear-cut heroes to cheer.
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Think of "Saving Private Ryan" without the characterization. Think of "No Man's Land" without the thought or ideas. Think of the most old-fashioned, stereotyped, clichéd war movie possible. That's the 2001 clunker from Fox called "Behind Enemy Lines." The film seems expressly designed for audiences who want nothing more than to watch people running around shooting one another and see things getting blown up. Frankly, I can't conceive of any other reason for the movie's being. Too bad, too, because it stars a pair of everybody's favorite actors, the always watchable Gene Hackman and the amiable Owen Wilson. This time out, though, there's not much to watch and even less to be happy about.
The setting is the Bosnian conflict. The protagonists are Hackman as Admiral Leslie Reigart, Commander of the Adriatic Battle Group, and Wilson as Lt. Chris Burnett, a Navy airman. The antagonists are Joaquim de Almeida as Admiral Juan Miguel Piquet, Commander of the NATO Naval Command, and Olek Krupa Miroslav as Miroslav Lokar, a Serbian army officer. How they get pitted against one another is perhaps simpler than it will appear from my analysis. The why is easier to explain: Shoddy war melodramas need sharply focused good guys and bad guys, and this film is intent on delivering them.
Hackman by now should be given an honorary commission in the U.S. Armed Forces, he's played military men so often. His Admiral Reigart is tough, as always, disciplined, old Navy, fiercely loyal. But, as expected, he has a heart of gold when it comes to the men in his command. Burnett is one of those men in his charge, a flyer who wants out of the Navy because he's bored after seven years of what he sees as doing nothing. On a routine photo reconnaissance mission for NATO, Burnett and his partner, Stackhouse (Gabriel Macht), stray into enemy territory taking pictures and get their jet plane shot down. If that isn't enough, they're chased by a Serbian army regiment led by Lokar, who wants them dead and whatever photos they've taken found. Lokar gets Stackhouse but not Burnett. Seems Lokar's been committing atrocities in the area, and he's afraid the world will see pictures of his war crimes if they're not located and destroyed.
Reigart hears of the situation and reports it to Piquet, who refuses to do anything to save the downed airman, fearful of an international incident since a NATO plane wasn't supposed to be behind enemy lines in the first place. So, while we have a main conflict in southern Bosnia between Burnett and Lokar's troops, we have another clash aboard an aircraft carrier between the two admirals. Now, if you can't see where the plot is heading from this brief introduction, you're no movie buff. In fact, Robert Redford played almost exactly the same character as Hackman's in the movie "Spy Game," also released in 2001, when Redford portrayed an aging government spy master going against government regulations to save an imprisoned young spy in his employ. Redman, Hackman, they're all the same heroes beneath the skin.
The Serbian forces are depicted as ruthless and barbaric, no shades of gray here. Lokar will stop at nothing to get his way, and killing a pair of American pilots is small potatoes next to the mass slaughter he has already committed. The surprising thing is that none of these circumstances generate any tension or suspense. The one and only sequence that does produce a modicum of excitement is one where Burnett's jet gets shot down, and I will admit that those few minutes do get the adrenaline flowing. But that's a relatively small part of the 105-minute movie. Mostly, the film follows a standard war-movie agenda of chase, shoot, and hide so shopworn one could write out the script in advance.
Like the cop movies where the star has only a few more days to retirement before he stumbles onto the case of a lifetime, so does Burnett, about to quit the Navy, bungle into the adventure of his life. Previously thought to be simply boyish and charming, Burnett turns into a superhero, able to dodge bullets with the grace of a Spiderman and outrun entire armies with the speed of a gazelle. Beyond the first few minutes of the story, Wilson is not allowed to show any of the winning qualities his screen characters are known for, instead turning in a performance that could have been executed by a second-string bit player. It's not his fault. He's given nothing to do but run around and look convincingly pained. That he accomplishes.
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[release]9881[/release]