It moves slowly and methodically, showing us the minutest particulars of every facet of the operation. There's more here than we need to know.
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Any similarity between the title of this World War II POW film and "The Great Escape" is purely intentional. Now, if only 2005's "The Great Raid" had boasted the same high degree of action, characterization, and humor as "The Great Escape," it might have gone somewhere.
As it is, this true-life adventure makes up for its rather stolid story line by being earnest to a fault. Which isn't such a bad idea, except that the movie never soars as it should. Given that the actual events depicted in the film are heroic and inspirational in the extreme, it's a shame the picture itself comes off as so old-fashioned and straightforward a melodrama.
I can best illustrate what I mean by "old-fashioned" by naming the movies I grew up with as a kid in the late forties and fifties in theaters and on TV. They were things like "Back to Bataan," "The Sands of Iwo Jima," "The Steel Helmet," and "A Walk in the Sun." They always starred either a studly hero or a group of distinctive personalities who came together like family; they always depicted a clear-cut and winnable mission; and they always made a pronounced separation between good guys and bad. "Saving Private Ryan" was in this mold, with a greater realism than possible in the old days.
"The Great Raid" follows the formula. The story may have been "inspired by true events," as the prologue notes, and the filmmakers may have gone to great lengths to obtain accuracy and authenticity in conveying the story, but it's still an old-fashioned rescue mission, nonetheless, filled with a typical band of recognizable personalities. The film's drawbacks are that without a John Wayne type in the lead, it must rely almost wholly on its "personalities," and they aren't quite distinct enough or compelling enough to sustain a fairly slow-going plot line; it makes the climactic raid, exciting though it is, a long time coming.
Still, the movie tells an amazing tale. Based on books by two authors, William B. Breur ("The Great Raid on Cabanatuan") and Hampton Sides ("Ghost Soldiers"), and directed by John Dahl ("Red Rock West," "The Last Seduction," "Joy Ride"), "The Great Raid" concerns a daring mission by a small group of American and Filipino soldiers in 1945 to rescue over 500 American POWs imprisoned by the Japanese for over three years on Bataan. These prisoners were among the last surviving members of the infamous "Bataan Death March," and most of them had been too sick for the Japanese to transport to other locations. The introduction tells us that by 1944 the Japanese high command had ordered the annihilation of all POWs without leaving a trace. It was imperative for the U.S. to rescue the men, or the Japanese would probably have killed them all.
The events of the movie take place over a five-day period, with narration and titles making it at times seem almost like a documentary. About 120 men of the 6th Ranger Battalion went in for the strike. Was it going to be easy? Hardly. There were over 30,000 Japanese soldiers in the vicinity of the Cabanatuan POW camp; there were some 800 guards at the camp; and the terrain surrounding the place was essentially flat and barren. As the American general says, it was a mission that appealed "more to the heart than the head."
The movie switches back and forth among three groups: (1) The Rangers, who are basically raw recruits with little or no combat experience; (2) an underground resistance movement in Manila; and (3) the POWs themselves. This makes for a long movie, over 130 minutes, and some awkward transitions, which ultimately prove its downfall. It tries to cover too much, and in doing so covers some of it superficially, especially the sequences involving the resistance movement.
Another weakness involves the cast, who do their best but never come across as individual and engaging enough characters. The star of the show, Benjamin Bratt, plays Lt. Col. Henry Mucci, the leader of the expedition. He's hard-nosed, impatient, and stubborn, and he speaks largely in clichés. I have no doubt the real man was actually this way, but he sounds too good to be true, particularly when he's telling his men he expects each of them to be in chapel the night before the mission, and he doesn't want any atheists on his team.
The film's narrator, Capt. Robert Prince (James Franco), is also the planner and co-leader of the raid. Prince is an intellectual, boy-next-door type, again almost stereotyped if he weren't a real person. Yet neither Franco nor Bratt conveys much charm or wit or personal identity. They seem generic; we never get close to them; and they become hard to care about.
The standout character is Major Daniel Gibson (Joseph Fiennes), the senior American officer in the POW camp, a man dying of malaria. Although Gibson is not in every scene, it is he the audience may remember the most, and it is he for whom we come to care. It's hard to forget his deep-felt love for his men and his deep-felt love for a nurse (Connie Nielsen) in Manila, secretly working for the underground and helping to smuggle medicine to the prisoners.
Probably the single greatest weakness in the film, though, is its pacing. It moves slowly and methodically, showing us the minutest particulars of every facet of the operation. There's more here than we need to know, given that up until its final third, the film contains very little action. Nevertheless, this is not to say that there aren't a few moving and/or gripping scenes along the way, especially one involving an escaped POW who is captured and brought back to the camp, as well as the scenes depicting the climactic raid; but such scenes are few and far between. Most of the time we're treated to characters who seem overly familiar and episodes that seem pulled from a hundred other war movies. The film even treats the Japanese as so many other war films have treated them--to the man either savage or corrupt. Well, as I mentioned above, you can't say the movie doesn't clearly identify the good guys and the bad.
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[release]17150[/release]