The Great Raid - The Adventure That Could Have Been More

Aug

7

The Great Raid - The Adventure That Could Have Been More

≡ Category: Action, Drama, Movie Reviews By Country, Suspense, United States |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: United States
Genre: Drama/Action/Suspense
Director: John Dahl
Year: 2005

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE

The Great Raid bombed at the box office and all but sealed the fate of director John Dahl, at least in features (You Kill Me was the final nail in the coffin — Dahl still works consistently in television). That’s a shame because John Dahl is one of our best genre directors.

Why did audiences stay away in droves from The Great Raid? My guess is because, for a war movie, The Great Raid is 90% buildup. There is very little action until the very end of the movie, and I think modern audiences just aren’t that patient. It’s not entirely their fault, though.

For audiences to make it to the climax of The Great Raid in one piece, it helps if they care about and believe in the characters involved. Most of the time, that doesn’t really happen in The Great Raid.

The problem is a combination of poor casting and inadequate screenwriting. Mind you, the acting and script aren’t exactly terrible. It’s just that, since we’re talking about a real life occurrence in World War II, The Great Raid needs to be deadly real in order to be maximally effective. The actors need to look and act like people of that generation. The words coming out of their mouths need to be believable in the context of men and women from the 1940s. The actors and actresses for the most part come across as very modern. The dialog is frequently non-idiomatic for the period or strained at best.

Benjamin Bratt may look like the real-life Lt. Colonel Mucci, the commander of the troops on the raid, but his delivery isn’t convincing as a commander of men. James Franco, Robert Mammone, Laird Macintosh, and the vast majority of the cast, look and act exactly like what they are — young men from the 21st century.

The Japanese actors fare much better, especially Motoki Kobayashi as Major Nagai. Actually, all of the Japanese actors are terrific. The sequences in which they abuse the Americans verbally and physically are by far the most powerful in the picture. The Filipino actors, especially the ones involved the underground resistance subplot, are also very fine.

But since the emphasis in The Great Raid is squarely on the Americans, the lack of credibility of the actors is a major problem.

In terms of believability of the characters and the milieau, The Great Raid is on the order of an adventure film like The Great Escape or The Dirty Dozen, which just isn’t good enough, not when you’re asking a modern audience to sit through an hour and a half of military strategy.

That’s too bad. John Dahl is nothing if not dependable when staging action. An early atrocity sequence is quite gripping, and the climax is reasonably exciting. Still, the action pales against the authenticity Steven Spielberg managed in the opening ten minutes of Saving Ryan’s Privates — mind you, that’s the only thing that Spielberg managed to do right in that movie.

Come to think of it, The Great Raid is kind of a real life version of Saving Ryan’s Privates.

In the prologue of The Great Raid, we’re told how the American military abandoned the Filipinos and Americans stationed in the Phillipines to the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, preferring to concentrate on the European theater. Eventually, the Americans returned to the Pacific theater with a vengeance. The problem was that the Japanese intended to slaughter all of the prisoners in their POW camps before they retreated.

To his credit, General Kreuger (Dale Dye, one of the few actors to be convincing as a man from the 1940s) has a hard time stomaching the idea of allowing the Japanese to slaughter the men in the camps, and authorizes a raid to rescue the men, even though there is little military value in such a raid. That’s a heckuva lot more believable than a general sending a battalion behind enemy lines to rescue Private Ryan so the military doesn’t have to tell his mother that all five of her sons have died defending their country.

In the end, The Great Raid works reasonably well as an adventure film. Since we know the story is true, it’s fascinating and suspenseful to see how Captain Prince (James Franco) and Lt. Colonel Mucci are forced to repeatedly modify their plan in midstream to deal with the movements of the Japanese forces. Frankly, it’s amazing that the rescue worked at all. Also, the subplot involving the Filipino underground resistance is suspenseful and heartbreaking.

But The Great Raid is a bit of a missed opportunity. If the actors playing the soldiers had been believable as mid-20th Century Americans, and if the authenticity of the milieau could have been maintained at the level of the first ten minutes of Saving Ryan’s Privates, The Great Raid could have been truly great.