One of the best

Rating: 9/10 (8 March 2007)

British officer goes daft in a sweat box, builds a bridge, and finally falls down on the job.
A masterpiece, but a difficult movie. The point of the movie is the tangled nature of duty, ethics and morality, but it always seemed to me that they get even more tangled up than the movie intended. Just what is good and evil, at the end? I'm darned if I know. The movie seems to indicate self-discoveries by both the British and Japanese commanding officers, and yet the end of the movie makes a hollow mockery of those discoveries, and pretty much everything else beyond killing and destruction. Even the final destruction of the bridge is mere accident. It's just about the bleakest picture painted by any movie.
I always found the soundtrack a bit overblown, to tell the truth, and a little distracting. Especially during the hike of the demo team to the bridge. The obligatory love interest is tacked-on and never feels like anything more than the obligatory love interest.
Otherwise, the movie is engrossing, the performances are riveting, the scenes are awe-inspiring, and the ending is shattering. If, as I said before, difficult. At 161 minutes, this is a very long movie, and I am very rarely willing to grant that any movie should be longer than about 100 minutes. In this case, every one of those 161 minutes are worthwhile. (OK maybe a few minutes could have been trimmed from the hike, and the lovey-dovey stuff.) It's a shame we'll never see the likes of Guinness again. (I say that not because a Guinness could never be born again, but because I can't believe we'll ever see movies that can provide these kinds of roles again.) His performance when he emerges from the sweat box and marches to the commanding Japanese officer's hut is alone enough to put him into the highest rank of acting. Sessue Hayakawa was also brilliant but overshadowed. Holden was good but frankly he looked a bit hackneyed when considered against the rest of the cast. To be fair, he was given the pontificating speeches, and it's hard not to look hackneyed when you're pontificating.