The Great Raid

The Great Raid (Director: John Dahl)

Dahl has had a fairly interesting career. My favorite of his is Rounders. The Last Seduction is also a very good movie, along with Red Rock West. Unforgettable is exactly the opposite of what its title suggests, and Joy Ride is certainly pretty fun. The Great Raid is based on two books: William B Breuer's The Great Raid on Cabanatuan and Hampton Sides' Ghost Soldiers. Carlo Bernard and Doug Miro adapted the screenplay, their first. This movie was slated for a 2003 release, but apparently because of the Disney/Miramax split, it got held up. Hmm....

You ever see a movie where one section is so good, it's a shame the rest isn't up to par? The Great Raid is one of those. A long setup time takes place between the opening and the titular subject, and surprisingly, a director as interesting as Dahl makes it extraordinarily dull. I didn't know much going in. It was hard for me to put a finger on who was showing me what I was seeing. I nearly fell down the steps when the movie was over and I found out it was Dahl.

The Great Raid concerns the POW camp of Cabanatuan, located in the Phillippines and run by the Japanese during World War II. U.S. forces have been briefed on the camp, and feel it necessary to save the soldiers being held there because the Japanese have mercilessly killed other U.S. soldiers in another camp (Did I say death camps? I meant happy camps!). A group of well-trained, unproven soldiers are sent to the rescue. Lt. Colonel Mucci (Benjamin Bratt) leads the charge, with Captain Prince (James Franco) planning it out. Meanwhile, in the camp, Major Gibson (Joseph Fiennes) suffers from malaria as his men, also sick and hungry, wait for death or escape. Gibson has a flame elsewhere in the country who has been helping smuggle medicine into the camp, Margaret Utinsky (Connie Nielsen), a woman who risks death with her underground cause. There's also a little bit of coverage of the rebellious Filipinos during the war, how they and the U.S. began to band together in order to topple the enemy.

The three stories get passed around until finally the raid takes place. While the attempt at building the story is admirable before getting to the action, it is very stale. Gibson is supposed to be a leader of men, and though he spends most of the movie with malaria and is weak, I would have liked to have seen something that truly displayed his leadership. The romance that apparently went unconsummated, for a variety of reasons, between he and Utinsky never seemed to have any weight--this is where a flashback might have helped, and even though you might say, "Well, flashbacks are cheap narrative devices," that wouldn't explain why there's dull voiceover narration in this.

Don't get me wrong, though. Once The Great Raid finally occurs, it's great cinema. The tactical plan before it occurs builds nice tension, and the actual execution of it is great. The lack of character development weakens it a bit, because key scenes get played by guys you haven't really gotten to know, and their life or death seems a little irrelevant. They are still good scenes, however. And that's what I believe the filmmakers are hoping you walk out of the movie talking about, and hence recommending it. But you have to sit through nearly two hours of washed-out, tedious film before getting to it.