Leave your brain and historical fact at the door.

Rating: 3/10 (19 September 2011)

This movie follows 4 soldiers who are present at the Malmedy Massacre but who escape and make their way through enemy controlled territory back to allied lines. I watched this movie because I've read about the Malmedy massacre, and given the title and the fact that Chuck Colson recommended it, I thought it might have a perspective on the atrocity worth my time. Wrong! Intellectually and morally this movie is absolutely weightless and the rewriting of history is offensive. The depiction of what happened at Malmedy is pretty close to what some of the Germans involved claimed happened. Why would the Germans involved tell the truth? Furthermore, the German story is contradicted by the forensic evidence and contradicts the independent eye witness testimony of several survivors. The fact is that many of the men killed were undoubtedly executed--close range, bullet to the head, clustered together. The others were gunned down as they tried to escape, probably once they knew they would die otherwise. Further evidence against the German story is that Malmedy wasn't an isolated event, there were a number of other massacres, some involving civilians, attributed to the same group of German SS soldiers. So why did the movie choose to depict the event based on the German account? Because the truth would have conflicted with the platitudinous main theme of "we're all the same, we just wear different uniforms". I am a Christian so of course I believe we are all created in the image of God, but I find this kind of moral equivalence nauseating and intellectually weightless. The other thing that significantly detracts from this movie is that it is extremely predictable. I knew the ultimate fate of every character 1/2 way through the movie and many of these scenes were clichÃ©. I gave it 4 stars because as a movie some of the scenes had their moments, I didn't turn it off, and there are so many other movies out there that are much worse so I have to leave room at the bottom to rate them.