mission: escape

Rating: 4/10 (22 December 2004)

The American film-maker Terrence Malick is sometimes nicknamed "Hollywood's beautiful loser" due to his large absence. I think it is unfair. It is true that Malick's filmography isn't very dense but his movies are much better than Gregory Hoblit's. I would (sadely) grant without hesitation the quoted nickname to Hoblit. After a first promising movie "Primal Fear" (1996) which owed a lot to Edward Norton, this director kept on discrediting himself throughout each movie he made. It is not this war movie "Hart's War" (2002) that will try to show the contrary.
I am writing to the people who didn't see this film. If you think that you deal with a war movie like "Saving Private Ryan" (1998) well you are wrong. "Hart's War" is a war movie without war! There's the share of shootings and explosions at the beginning of the movie but after that, the movie especially focuses on psychological tensions between the American soldiers. On another hand, the main star isn't Bruce Willis as the poster suggests but Colin Farrell who offers a quite impressive performance but his character remains too confined in Hollywood conventions to be really terrific. To come back to Bruce Willis, during the most important part of the film, we wonder what is his real function in the story. The answer only appears at the end of the movie (it obeys to Hoblit's will to keep the best till last) and I won't reveal it.
What is wrong with "Hart's War"? Simply, this movie is handicapped with glaring implausibilities which deals a severe to the credibility of the plan.
First the action of the film takes place in the beginning of 1945. It isn't the ideal time for this kind of story for the simple and good reason that the Second World War was almost finished in Europe. For German troops, it was the debacle and they didn't hesitate in setting the American soldiers free from the camps in which they were imprisoned.
Then, the Nazis were keen on Hitler's racist theses contending the supremacy of the Aryan race and the extinction of the Jews, the black etc... But if the black American soldier was charged with murder, why didn't they kill him instead of letting Willis organizing a real trial for him? I think Hoblit tried to avoid a tempting caricature towards the German soldiers and to grant them a little light of humanity. But it is hard to believe that one of the German leaders studied in Yale and is fond of Afro-American jazz music.
In another extent, the director offers a neutral and sanitized image of life of American prisoners in the camp. We see American prisoners playing cards, ball or having fun (whereas beside them there are Russian prisoners who are working). However, it is certain that life in those camps was tough and German soldiers were surely manhandling their prisoners.
As for the trial, I think it is only of minor interest and Hoblit has no hesitation in denouncing racial injustices through the lieutenant Lincoln A Scott. Behind this trial, an escape plan is setting in motion and it is a hare-brained one: how did the Americans manage to find the useful tools to dig their tunnel? By the way, the movie wouldn't be full without the inevitable (and very American) final moral which ends up tarnishing Hoblit's work.
What have we got at the end? A poor war movie with an artificial construction and where the politically correct is "de rigueur". It also testifies a sadder thing: the (definitve?) loss of a talent: Gregory Hoblit.