George Clooney leads a group of ordinary GIs into Iraq in pursuit of Saddam Hussein's gold bullion in the aftermath of the Gulf War. (Kids, that was 1991. We won.) At first the film looks like "Kelly's Heroes." But that's only because the targeted gold allows for an exploration of some of the internal political dynamics of Iraq, and for some outstanding if commercially handled action scenes as well. The gold is a MacGuffin, just a plot point to keep our guys on the move, in and out of danger.
The Iraqi soldiers are mostly presented as stereotypical villains. While the Americans look on, the Iraqi army captures a handful of anti-Saddam rebels. Then they shoot a woman at point blank range through the head while her young husband and little girl look on. The scene isn't handled discreetly. The woman falls to the sand and a pool of blood forms under her while the daughter tears herself loose and runs to the corpse, shrieking, "Mamma, mama!" In a way it's the opposite of how Spielberg handled atrocity in "Schindler's List," where such scenes are presented matter of factly, under the assumption that the mature audience knows how horrible these acts are without being kicked in the pants by a screaming child. But then there's an adolescent quality in much of the direction. Sometimes the action is thrilling and slightly comic, an upended truck sliding to a stop only inches from the land mine the driver is goggling at. There's the expectable slow motion as some of the artifacts explode. And the ambient sound shuts off while we follow the trajectories of a couple of particularly important bullets whizzing through the air in slow motion.
I'm not sure whether such obvious tricks belong in this kind of movie or not. The script itself, willy nilly, provides plenty of comic moments without the director's having force fed additional laughs to the viewer. If anything, comedic intent at the wrong time drains incidents of some of their dramatic value.
The movie paints the Americans as greedy and unethical, maybe, but fundamentally good, pausing in their quest for pelf long enough to rescue damsels in distress, and some guys as well. And it criticizes American policy in the war's wake. George H. W. Bush encouraged Iraqi rebels and then he didn't help them. In light of current events, one is compelled to wonder whether it was such a bad idea to stay out of it. The movie criticizes American policy by seeming to argue only that we should have gone ahead, taken Bagdhad, booted Saddam out, and installed a democracy. In that order. At this point it's beginning to look less like "Kelly's Heroes" and a little like "Rambo." The story has one of our guys captured by Saddam's forces and tortured in an unspeakable way in an underground bunker. But then the plot deals us the joker we could never have expected was still in the deck. One of the Iraqi interrogators, in a polished performance combining malevolence with an impassive but genuine curiosity, quizzes the American prisoner concerning the morality of the war -- and the answers aren't easy to come up with. We can't respond with easily available schema about "you and your kind." The scene is presented without much subtlety. It's obviously posed. And yet it may be the most important and memorable in the film, lifting it out of the action/comedy genre that laid claim to American screens through much of the 1980s and 1990s. It may be obvious but it may be necessary too. Its very starkness may be required to penetrate the firewall we've constructed around our conception of the world as one of Biblical good and evil.
Clooney's a good actor, along the lines of Clark Gable. Masculine enough not to be off-putting to men, while (I guess) handsome enough to appeal to women. Interesting enough to have a beer and an argument with.
Recommended? Yes. It ought to satisfy anyone whose movie values encompass more than video games.
The Iraqi soldiers are mostly presented as stereotypical villains. While the Americans look on, the Iraqi army captures a handful of anti-Saddam rebels. Then they shoot a woman at point blank range through the head while her young husband and little girl look on. The scene isn't handled discreetly. The woman falls to the sand and a pool of blood forms under her while the daughter tears herself loose and runs to the corpse, shrieking, "Mamma, mama!" In a way it's the opposite of how Spielberg handled atrocity in "Schindler's List," where such scenes are presented matter of factly, under the assumption that the mature audience knows how horrible these acts are without being kicked in the pants by a screaming child. But then there's an adolescent quality in much of the direction. Sometimes the action is thrilling and slightly comic, an upended truck sliding to a stop only inches from the land mine the driver is goggling at. There's the expectable slow motion as some of the artifacts explode. And the ambient sound shuts off while we follow the trajectories of a couple of particularly important bullets whizzing through the air in slow motion.
I'm not sure whether such obvious tricks belong in this kind of movie or not. The script itself, willy nilly, provides plenty of comic moments without the director's having force fed additional laughs to the viewer. If anything, comedic intent at the wrong time drains incidents of some of their dramatic value.
The movie paints the Americans as greedy and unethical, maybe, but fundamentally good, pausing in their quest for pelf long enough to rescue damsels in distress, and some guys as well. And it criticizes American policy in the war's wake. George H. W. Bush encouraged Iraqi rebels and then he didn't help them. In light of current events, one is compelled to wonder whether it was such a bad idea to stay out of it. The movie criticizes American policy by seeming to argue only that we should have gone ahead, taken Bagdhad, booted Saddam out, and installed a democracy. In that order. At this point it's beginning to look less like "Kelly's Heroes" and a little like "Rambo." The story has one of our guys captured by Saddam's forces and tortured in an unspeakable way in an underground bunker. But then the plot deals us the joker we could never have expected was still in the deck. One of the Iraqi interrogators, in a polished performance combining malevolence with an impassive but genuine curiosity, quizzes the American prisoner concerning the morality of the war -- and the answers aren't easy to come up with. We can't respond with easily available schema about "you and your kind." The scene is presented without much subtlety. It's obviously posed. And yet it may be the most important and memorable in the film, lifting it out of the action/comedy genre that laid claim to American screens through much of the 1980s and 1990s. It may be obvious but it may be necessary too. Its very starkness may be required to penetrate the firewall we've constructed around our conception of the world as one of Biblical good and evil.
Clooney's a good actor, along the lines of Clark Gable. Masculine enough not to be off-putting to men, while (I guess) handsome enough to appeal to women. Interesting enough to have a beer and an argument with.
Recommended? Yes. It ought to satisfy anyone whose movie values encompass more than video games.