Country: United States
Genre: Drama
Director: Brian De Palma
Year: 1989
Rating: 
Brian De Palma is an infuriating director. For every good movie he gives us, like Blowout, The Fury, Phantom of the Paradise, or The Untouchables, he gives us a tone deaf travesty like Bonfire of the Vanities or an out and out abomination like Casualties of War
Ostensibly an examination of how the crucible of war burns away decency in ordinary men, allowing them to commit atrocities, Casualties of War instead plays like a celebration of atrocity, specifically the gang rape and subsequent murder of a Vietnamese girl.
Sure, De Palma has that paragon of decency, Michael J. Fox, feebly protest the festivities, but the way De Palma films the events gives the game away. I started to smell something fishy when the gang rape scene went on and on and on and on, well past the point of diminishing dramatic returns. But the real abomination was how he filmed the murder. The film slows down to a crawl, the better to savor the multiple stabbings, bullet wounds, screams of “Kill the whore!”, cries of agony and despair, and the climactic death plunge of the victim. De Palma depicts these events with lip smacking relish.
Maybe he’s doing this subconsciously (heaven knows he’s done it before and since, in movies like Body Double and the recently released Redacted, which is basically a remake of Casualties of War), but somewhere in the man’s twisted mind, he gets off on the suffering of women. He’s a closet misogynist.
To add insult to injury, the events bracketing the atrocity are filmed indifferently. For all the reality they evince, the Vietnam scenes might as well have been lensed at Walt Disney World. The stateside sequences are forced and unnatural as well.
It’s as though De Palma couldn’t wait to get his rocks off and lost interest after he shot his load.
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