Wears out its welcome

Rating: 4/10 (31 October 2011)

This movie is two and a half hours long, and even though its full of non stop action and war scenes, it gets boring and drawn out. After about an hour and a half, the action started getting stale and tedious. But it just keeps going for almost another hour and its the same thing, the same kind of battle scenes, it got really dull. Also, I never got the feeling these guys were really in the action, most of them seemed to come out of the many battles unscathed and there was no real sense of them in danger.
The movie is well done in its production qualities, and the camera is used to good effect with nice shots and overall its a pretty movie in the way its filmed. But the movie's tone seems to think that it is much more serious than it really is and has a fake gravitas that it gives itself, when its basically a very superficial movie.
The patriotism angle is played too hard and is without subtlety, its like the movie says - look at all these heroic American soldiers and they all are so noble and brave, fighting against these black savages who appear to have endless numbers and who want nothing more than to kill them - I mean, seriously, give me a break.
Plus many scenes were too composed and almost looked like a music video or something with slow-motion and corny "African" music playing over the scene. In sum total, an over-rated war movie. The recent sci-fi/war movie Battle: Los Angeles was better than this in both the action and being fun to watch.