So outrageous it becomes blatantly funny!

Rating: 5/10 (29 July 2014)

I never thought it possible that a film with such heavy subject would have me laughing at the end! But thats exactly what happened. After depicting all the clichés that there are about the wars at the middle East (for most of the time, so efficiently and subtly that the movie went quiet well up to a point), and after having us convinced we are actually seeing a really good movie, it drops a twist so "over the top " that instead of delving us in shock, it just leave us there standing like in WTF happened now?
MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD......
So, the mother had an illegitimate child that was taken away from her (after the killing of her boyfriend by her family) ,who was then captured and trained from an opposite group, who was then later captured and imprisoned from the original group, and then in the blink of an eye changes his loyalties, becomes a tormentor, ends up raping his own mother, and the later, after encountering her son/rapist completely accidentally in the other edge of the world, collapses and dies but arranges to sent her offsprings to find their brother/dad for closure! (which she still loves of course!) Sorry, this is so extreme that it no longer seems horrible or serve us to transmit the dismals of war, it just becomes plainly laughable. If you ever saw a movie that tries so hard to make a point that it TOTALLY misses it, then that movie was it!
In the background of course, there are masterfully presented descriptions of the horrors of war, especially civil war, which every nation who has been through this process knows how worst is from "normal" wars, but again everything is given with such extremity, crazy coincidences and the like that you can only accept it if you take them for their symbolic meaning. Unfortunately, the end is so extremely absurd that simply ruins the strength of the movie. Everyone knows what happens in wars. Sorry, such crazy development doesn't happen even in them.
The saddest part is how many people embraced that movie, showing beyond a doubt how accurate the story about the naked king (H.C. Andersen) still stands today, both among the critics and the common people. But then again, there is no surprise there!
In conclusion if you want to see a "punch in the gut" about such subjects, see "Whistleblower" (or Hotel Rwanda and the like), who truly deliver. This one is betrayed by the fact that it simply tries too much, and hence looses the realism that would give the movie its strength. Oh well, next time...