The Heart of Heart's War

Rating: 9/10 (3 July 2018)

I have to confess that one of the main reasons I was anxious to see Hart's War was because I was in the Czech Republic when it was being filmed there. I had hoped for glorious images of the beautiful countryside that I had seen last May. Because the majority of the film takes place in a POW camp (therefore a studio set) there is very little of the Czech landscape to be seen in this film. The film does offer a view of the American landscape from the not-so-distant past by focusing on racial conflict among U.S. military personnel during World War II.
I had expected a film in the tradition of Stalag 17 or The Great Escape. While there are elements of these films here, the heart of the film is closer to A Soldier's Story or Men of Honor. The film actually weaves together several different stories and is part hero's quest, part racial conflict, part courtroom drama, and part POW film. It is to the credit of director Gregory Hoblit (not Hobbit-different film) that the different threads come together reasonably well.
Initially, the film is about Captain Hart (Colin Farrell) and the circumstances surrounding his arrival at the POW camp. Because of a conflict with the senior officer (Bruce Willis) among the POW's, he is placed in a barracks with the enlisted men. He is just getting to know them and win their trust when two more officers are placed in the barracks-two black pilots who are part of the Tuskegee Airmen. The other enlisted men resent their presence there and the racial tension results in a betrayal, a murder, and ultimately the framing of an innocent man.
At the heart of the film is the irony of the U.S. involvement in fighting the evil perpetrators of the holocaust while tolerating "ethnic cleansing" at home in the U.S. In one of the more powerful scenes, one of the black officers tells the story of watching German POW's in the US being escorted into movie theaters where blacks were not allowed-not even blacks training to be Tuskegee airmen.
The acting in the film was very good and the visual elements were solid. The Rachel Portman score added just the right touches at just the right times. There are points where the drama is a bit contrived, and I have mixed feelings about the twists and turns at the end of the film. On the whole, however, if your only other options are a seventh viewing of Lord of the Rings, yet another thoughtless shoot-em-up, or Britney Spears in her screen debut, Hart's War is definitely worth a look.