flawed

Rating: 5/10 (6 March 2006)

The first time I saw this movie, I loved it. But at a second viewing, I realized with dismay that there was a major discrepancy in it that invalidated the entire point of the film. Almost every movie has a goof or an inconsistency, and while that annoys me sometimes it usually doesn't take away from the overall value of the film: Silence of the Lambs, a great movie, has no fewer than four major inconsistent or contradictory moments in it. The problem with this movie is that the contradiction goes to the very essence of the movie's theme. Briefly, the plot goes thusly: Samuel Jackson is in charge of a unit of Marines which is sent to an unspecified US embassy to protect it from increasingly hostile mobs. At some point, the mob becomes violent and, more, begins attacking the embassy. Jackson spirits out the ambassador and his wife, along with other staff, and then defends the embassy. Finally, he gives the order to fire into the crowd that is stoning and shooting at the building, and the unit does so with devastating results. When the smoke clears, dozens lie dead and many more wounded, including many women and children, and not a weapon is in sight. The resulting furor and outrage leads to a court-martial for Jackson. The central thesis of the film is that Jackson and Jackson alone saw the weapons. For reasons which are explained but are not totally convincing, a State Department employee destroys the surveillance tape from the embassy which clearly shows the weapons being fired by the mob. The rest of the movie describes how Jackson is defended by Tommy Lee Jones, who undertakes his own investigation.
This whole thesis falls apart, however, when you watch the scene where the Marines begin firing into the crowd. There are two impossibilities here that Friedkin (the director) asks us to swallow: 1, that an entire platoon of Marines --roughly thirty men-- rise up over the wall, aim their weapons and fire for ten to fifteen seconds --and not a single one of them sees a weapon. Impossible. Even less possible: 2, after the firing stops, all the weapons that were in the crowd (and shown on the surveillance tape) disappear --just like that! Where did they go? Thirty marines are standing on a rooftop not fifty feet away from the square, looking down at it, and all those weapons are taken away without them (or the tape) seeing it. Absolutely impossible.
If this were a minor (or even major) discrepancy, but had no relation to the rest of the action, then I wouldn't even comment on it. But the entire movie rests on the idea that only Jackson saw what he did --and that is a flat impossibility. For me, that ruined what would have otherwise been a fine film. That is very poor writing. Too bad.