Objection, Your Honour!

Rating: Null/10 (12 November 2003)

This movie has just premiered on British TV. I approached it in a positive frame of mind. I'm not one of those professional whingers who'll lay into a film just because it's about the US military (See the knee-jerk reviews of superior fare like Black Hawk Down, Tears of the Sun etc). But try as I might, I couldn't escape the conclusion that this film is a disgrace to its own country.
Spoilers follow.
Never mind the idiotic plotting (Okay, let's track down an anonymous NVA officer in two weeks flat). Never mind that the Marine unit clearly didn't give a damn who they were firing at (Witness their failure to notice a single weapon or muzzle-flash as they massacred the crowd) The `moral' of the opening sequence turns out to be that war crimes are justified if they achieve the desired goal. So that's most of the Waffen SS off the hook, then.
Even in a dramatic sense, the film is a botched job. This could have been a `Rashomon' style drama, with different takes on the same event, and a real debate about which one was the true one. Instead we have black & white platitudes, demonised foreigners and an attitude to non-American humanity that is best summed up by the phrase `Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out.'