Unearned

Rating: Null/10 (15 May 1999)

Spielberg does to Kurosawa and Welles what Mark McGwire did to Roger Marris in the magnificently staged battle scenes that bookend this D-Day melodrama. His beach-storming opening pushes the how-much-can-you-stand? envelope about twenty feet farther than even the most daring moments in SCHINDLER'S LIST; he seems to have an unerring sixth sense for the audience's breaking point. And the climax--a cat-and-mouse game between the spottily armed American platoon and a series of tank-bound Germans--suggests a set piece from THE GREAT ESCAPE with nineties technology and Spielbergian horse sense.
It was Spielberg's derring-do that made this movie a monster hit--not the star presence of Tom Hanks as the saver and Matt Damon as the saved. And it certainly wasn't the script, which affords Spielberg a few opportunities for nicely offhand, verite-ish, lived-in scenes, but consists mostly of Tom Hanks staring at a distant cloud and delivering the most sentimental "unsentimental" bromides in a war movie ever. Hanks is supposed to be a scruffier, more cynical and wised-up version of the Henry Fonda Good American. His monologues of common, simple decency have the numbing monotony of a centrist Democrat Senator dedicating a new high school. Hanks morphing into a latter-day Jimmy Stewart is dismal enough; the speechifying by members of his platoon, especially the unendurable Ed Burns commemorating his girl-back-home's mammoth breasts, take the movie to flatline status. (The script was uncreditedly rewritten by Frank Darabont, of the poor-man's-Spielberg SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION.)