A Casualty Alright...

Rating: Null/10 (18 August 2000)

I confess: I didn't watch this one too closely. In my defense, it was tough.
I couldn't get over Michael J. Fox's presence in this movie. Where was Doc Brown and the flux capacitor? Where were the rest of the Keaton clan?
Sean Penn could have saved me, but Penn has been in every Vietnam film ever made, or at least so it seems, and usually playing the same character, so the unique reality of this movie began to blur into all the other Vietnam pics in the genre.
So you've got the surrealism of Fox as the lead and the mimeographed quality of Penn's calloused soldier redux.
But I'm not too jaded to ignore the fact that the film packs some power. It doesn't hold a candle to Platoon or Saving Private Ryan, but if this is your first in the war-is-literally-and-viscerally-hell genre, be prepared to be stunned.
That said, the flashback device may have never been so clunkily misused. Fox, after the war, sees a young Asian woman on a bus. She resembles someone...fade to the jungles. We never revisit that bus until moments before the credits roll-but in just enough time for a heavy-handed sage-wisdom summary just to make sure Fox can get on with his life. Ah, if only the real veterans of that war could have been healed as easily.
One scene in particular both rankles and amuses. Fox, appalled by war atrocities, approaches his decent buddy and launches into what feels like a five-minute monologue on existentialist ethics: we are but brief candles, so we must bear our unbearable freedom honorably...live every day as if it were your last. This scene was unwittingly spoofed in another Fox film, The Hard Way, when Fox's actor character steals overwrought lines from James Woods and delivers them with all the finesse of a Mack truck.
DePalma, SchmePalma: Marty McFly should never have time-traveled to the Vietnam War.