a moving true story, put through the Oliver Stone wringer

Rating: 3/10 (8 November 2010)

Just because Oliver Stone's heart is in the right place doesn't make this unofficial sequel to his Oscar winning 'Platoon' a good film, and in typical sledgehammer fashion he turns the moving true story of disabled, disillusioned Vietnam War veteran Ron Kovic into little more than a bad soap opera. Stone co-wrote the screenplay with Kovic himself, but judging from the presentation it's clearly an Oliver Stone project: the film is visually and verbally bombastic, overwrought with clichés, dripping with sentiment, and weighed down by the director's usual battery of cosmetic effects. The combat sequences and VA hospital scenes carry moments of genuine impact, but elsewhere the film is saturated with artificial music cues, fancy camera angles, portentous slow motion effects, and more tight close-ups than the average made-for-TV movie. A measure of redemption is supplied by the high caliber acting of (surprise) Tom Cruise, but there's a limit to what even he can do: when the life of an actual person is reduced to stereotype it's difficult to stretch him back to three credible dimensions again.