My God, how did anyone ever think this was a good movie?

Rating: 1/10 (13 September 2009)

Like so many movies of its genre — and by genre, I mean rah-rah-jingoistic, old old OLD school war movies — this work reduces what might otherwise be textured characters to quips and one-liners that some linear thinking Republican might once have considered funny, but no one else possible could have.
It's crap. It's preposterous ham-fisted canonization, and as great as George C. Scott is as an actor, he cannot remotely make it work as anything other than broad, jingoistic caricature buoying a right-wing icon. "Dammit, I don't want my soldiers to love me, I want to fight for me!" — or some such hackwork.
Scott is charismatic, yes, which gets it one star — the rest is absolute amateur-hour: god-awful sanitized "action" scenes, nary a thought given to historical accuracy, no semblance of even basic continuity. It's like somebody got an A-budget to make a B-movie, peed it away on just being a bad filmmaker, and the vaunted Academy gave it some awards because they figured Vietnam was lost and America needed a shot of B-12 in the balls.
Ah, but the sainted subject matter — the irreverent, anachronistic, God-fearing general who nevertheless cursed liberally, disrespected the authority he damn well expected everyone to follow as long it was him, because he was that mesmerizing a presence — and yet, we don't hear one actual curse from this institutional "rebel" the entire movie or get any sense of how he did things differently other than disobey his orders to inflate his sense of his own nigh-psychotic narcissism, even as the filmmaker seems to pass this off as simply a symptom of "greatness." This movie belongs in the category of The Green Berets, an archaic hunk of fecal matter that profanes difficult, textured subject matter of a three dimensional world by rendering it, badly, two-dimensionally, stupidly, with the purview of a so-called patriot, and yet diminishing patriotism by rendering it down something no more complex than blind religion. It all bespeaks the dogmatic limitations of the filmmakers, notably a glaring lack of talent or deliberation or capacity for lateral thought.
My dad used to say how he agreed with Patton, that he should have kept on going after Germany straight to Moscow. It was an easy, cursory, dumb quip to deal with a nightmarish scenario, one so many of us lived under for far too many years. There was horrific danger in that kind of mentality, and it took a psychotic demagogue to breathe such words at all while wielding the potential martial power to actually do it — like a Gen. Jack D. Ripper fifteen years removed. That would have been an incredibly complex character for a filmmaker to show and a viewer try to understand, to weigh the retarded, dogmatic simplicity of his world-view with the bleak scape of a globe already in smoking ruin, genocide made into industry, with tens of millions already dead. Such a character study, of someone so fanatical, of such blue-eyed self-righteousness, as to presume himself a suitable master-race fuhrer for the master-race he had dispossessed, that would have been a profoundly mesmerizing premise for a movie, and something George C. Scott would have torn into like a rare steak.
Instead we got this. Don't believe a word your Republican parents say. This was NEVER a good movie and it won't ever be.