Slow at first, packs a wallop at the end

Rating: 8/10 (7 August 2005)

I watched this film after reading Hampton Sides' excellent book, Ghost Soldiers, and I did not feel disappointed at the end. The structure of the film is straightforward: newsreel footage and the presentation of Japanese atrocities against American POW's starts the audience off hating the Japanese; from there, the story pretty much follows the book, with one exception. In reality, there were a number of Philippine resistance channels operating on behalf of the starving, disease-ridden prisoners. The filmmakers chose to combine many into one and base that one channel on a platonic love affair. Why not? Many resistance fighters were motivated simply by patriotism and hatred of the Japanese-but that would have taken more screen time to establish, and would have taken attention off the main story.
The film gets off to a slow start, deliberately, I assume, to present contrast with the action at the finish. Everyone underplays, the POWs, appropriately, because they are being starved to death, and the US Rangers because-why? I'm not sure, but the effect is well-maintained: everything leads up to the firefight at the camp which lasts, on screen, approximately as long as it lasted at the Cabanatuan camp in 1945. By the time that happens, the audience is ready for it. The film also makes a point of the reliance of the Rangers on local Philippine guerrillas, who wound up wiping out a battalion of Japanese which could have relieved the camp garrison and halted the rescue. I'm still a little puzzled by the flattened affect of the players. Even Benjamin Bratt, who plays the overall commander of the raid, only cuts loose once, in a stem-winder of a pep talk to his green recruits, most of whom haven't heard a shot fired in anger. But on the whole, the film presents events in a manner true to the original, and keeps it all moving along dramatically enough to maintain interest and have some punch at the end. At the Sneak Preview I saw, there was a smattering of applause at the end, and nobody got up to leave until the music stopped, the screen went black and the detailed credits started rolling.