An excellent movie with perfect pacing

Rating: 9/10 (13 August 2005)

I give The Great Raid a 9 out of 10. It has good acting, well-written plot, and what I consider to be important, perfect pacing.
The various threads of the story (the nurse in Manila, the soldiers making their way to the POWs, the POWs) are followed until at the end, of course, all the action converges on the raid itself and the aftermath.
Cesar Montano, who is already a well-known actor in the Philippines, does a good job as the Filipino guerrilla leader (trivia: some of the words he says when fighting the Japanese are in fact, pretty crude swear words; they are not translated into English with subtitles).
I rank this film up there with "the greats" of war films, like Mel Gibson's The Patriot.