'Raid' never quite reaches the level of the title

Friday, August 12, 2005

By WILLIAM ARNOLD
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC

John Dahl's "The Great Raid" tells the true story of the daring liberation of an American POW camp in the Japanese-occupied Philippines of the closing days of WWII. It's a tough, no-nonsense war movie of the old school, without an obvious digital effect in sight.

MOVIE REVIEW

THE GREAT RAID

DIRECTOR: John Dahl

CAST: Benjamin Bratt, James Franco, Joseph Fiennes, Connie Nielsen, Marton Csokas

RUNNING TIME: 133 minutes

GRADE: B-

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This makes it unique in the current action-movie marketplace. But, truth be told, the film -- which Miramax has had sitting on a shelf since 2003 -- is routine: the kind of one-note war movie that Hollywood used to crank out by the dozens every year in the 1950s.

Fans of Dahl ("The Last Seduction," "Red Rock West") may find it particularly disappointing, because his characters seem flat and his scope narrow, and he doesn't get anywhere near such classics of the Asian POW genre as "The Bridge on the River Kwai" or "King Rat."

Based on two non-fiction books (and reportedly very accurate to historical fact), it opens with a scene of a horrible atrocity in which American POWs of a Southern Philippines camp are herded into air-raid shelters, soaked with gasoline and burned alive.

This final-solution policy established, the movie cuts to a special force of U.S. Army Rangers, who have landed on Luzon with Gen. Douglas MacArthur and whose job it is to liberate a camp near Manila where the POWs -- survivors of the Bataan Death March -- are similarly marked for death.

From here, the movie jumps around between the American rescuers, the imperiled inmates of the camp and a group of Western civilians in Manila, mostly religious and medical personnel, who smuggle medicine into the camp and serve as its link to the outside world.

The drama is well-paced and often exciting, the camera work (aping the washed-out look of old color photographs of the 1940s) is arresting and the geography looks surprisingly authentic, considering it was shot in Australia (with Shanghai serving as colonial-era Manila).

The script is not a bit afraid of offending Hollywood's largest overseas film market by portraying Japan's WWII soldiers as homicidal brutes. This is refreshing at first, but after a dozen or so atrocities you begin to feel you've wandered into an old propaganda film.

"The Great Raid" is also seriously deficient of star-power: Benjamin Bratt and James Franco generate little excitement as the Ranger leaders. Joseph Fiennes and Connie Nielsen are better as an ailing POW and a nurse, but their grand love affair never quite comes off.

Despite the fact that Dahl manages a number of very effective scenes in his lengthy build-up, his rather muddled climax doesn't pay off with any moral enlightenment or much in the way of a visceral or emotional punch. So, whatever else the film is, it's instantly forgettable.

P-I movie critic William Arnold can be reached at 206-448-8185 or williamarnold@seattlepi.com.