A powerful story, poorly told

Rating: 5/10 (27 September 2009)

Incredibly uneven Vietnam drama from pulp master Brian De Palma. De Palma's the problem here - he's really the kind of director who needs to stay away from serious subject matters, because he's too ham-fisted to handle it with any tact. He does very well with more B-level stuff, and he can definitely be masterful in movies like Carrie and Sisters (though he screws that stuff up as often as not, too). Casualties of War is about a five-person squadron (Michael J. Fox, John Leguizamo, John C. Reilly, Don Harvey and led by Sean Penn) who kidnap a teenage Vietnamese girl, march her into the jungle, rape her and then murder her. Fox is the lone objector in the group, but there's nothing he can do to stop them. He's just a private under Penn's command. Plus, they all have guns and are presumably better at using them than he is. When the group returns from the mission, Fox tries to do the right thing and bring about justice, but his superiors (including Ving Rhames) are mostly unwilling to listen. Yeah, this is powerful stuff. The problem is, De Palma doesn't think we will know that if he just presents it. He has to throw it at us, underlining every little thing, and giving the actors big speeches (one particular shot with Fox seems so clearly to be meant as his Oscar clip that I had to giggle). The worst part of the film by far is the score. Who wrote it? None other than the great Ennio Morricone. I guess everyone has an off day, but I've never heard Morricone deliver a score that was even mediocre (okay, maybe his John Carpenter knock-off score for The Thing). This one is downright putrid. The whole film is terribly overscored. I think that was done to go along with Sean Penn's overacting. The guy's frequently been accused of overdoing it, but generally I think his methody style works. Not here. He's never been worse. By comparison, Michael J. Fox actually isn't half bad. It's pretty clear he wasn't meant for heavy drama, though. Brian De Palma made a startlingly similar movie about the Iraq War in 2007, the even worse Redacted. I know both of these stories are true and they certainly are both subjects worthy of a film treatment, but De Palma was not the one to do it. And, having done both of these movies, it almost seems like he has a beef with U.S. soldiers.