Turkey shoot

Rating: 2/10 (28 November 2014)

Starting well, if slowly, and not very coherently, the look and development is quite good, though much in the wake of Private Ryan, all those years ago.
The narrative does the old trick of the new recruit and his immersion in war. The tank crew, tight and loyal, are all there to instill what is required to the new dude. It's not a new presentation; it's not bad and looks very good and the early battle scenes are realistic, in tension and dramatic flow.
And then it fails. There is the final cataclysmic battle. Films like this can only go in two ways: either everyone lives or no one does. If no one does they are heroes and that's the formula here. What is quite repulsive is the length of the final battle scene which has an immobilized tank and its crew outwitting hundreds of enemy troops. It turns into mass slaughter as if this is what what heroism is all about but it also deceives the viewer - as all those 1950s and '60s movies did with German soldiers running into a hail of bullets as target practice for the smart US/Allied soldiers.
It defies sense, and also the historical record as to how the German troops were led at this time, in their capacity to improvisation and battle tactics, which makes this final scene so completely sickening as a violent fantasy; it undermines the ideal of heroism and how battles are fought in real wars. It plays to the juvenile male spectator who is accustomed to the thrills of software games, not actual battles.
In all, it's a Hollywood fraud, worse so because it starts well and with the virtues expected of the material, but leans to the cheap and moronic, and as such, deserves nothing but contempt.