The worst war movie in recent memory.

Rating: 3/10 (8 August 2005)

I love war movies and usually keep tabs on the upcoming films in the genre. Therefore I was shocked last week when I saw a television commercial for "The Great Raid", a movie I had heard nothing about. Now I know why.
Inspired by actual events, "The Great Raid" relates a relatively obscure World War II story in which the 6th Ranger Battalion must rescue 500 American prisoners-of-war from Cabanatuan, a Japanese POW camp in the Philippines. The film traces three converging stories about the POWs, the men sent to liberate them, and the civilian resistance front aiding the process, one member of which is romantically linked to one of the prisoners.
While this plot sounds like an excellent foundation, the script and its interpretation prove to be the movie's complete undoing. War films do not require a full portrayal of everything related to the point of emphasis. Other aspects can be incorporated (as in "Saving Private Ryan") through brief asides or short encounters with incidental characters. These cinematic conveniences are conspicuous here in their absence, as director John Dahl ("Rounders") and company ambitiously attempt to simultaneously tell all three sides of the story, and succeed in fully telling none of them. Had the movie focused on the rescue, it could have been decent. Instead trite and shrug-inducing story lines haphazardly slow everything down, pushing the decent battle scenes to the final act, by which point they are as inevitable and anticlimactic as possible. It is like stuffing an appropriately long one-hour episode of "Band of Brothers" with far too much filler that overwhelms the actual point of the story.
Due to this lack of action, numerous head-scratching military activities, and a weak romantic story arc, "The Great Raid" never feels like any kind of war film, let alone a good one. Soldiers spy on passing enemies from visible locations a few feet away; in a scene that nearly parodies itself, a captain hastily scrawls important battle plans in the dirt; characters' motives are rarely explained. Considering how much time is spent attempting to rachet up the drama, the audience is told as little as possible about all of the involved parties. A good amount of that time is spent relating a semi-love story that suffers from "Cold Mountain" syndrome. The love interests are never given even cursory screen time together, and with the relationship sketchy anyway, the lack of any established connection causes that half of the movie to flounder as well.
High technical achievement could possibly have salvaged "The Great Raid", but the special effects, like the nondescript acting, are nothing more than average. The music of Trevor Rabin ("Armageddon") ranges from cartoon-like to a melodrama beyond anything John Williams has ever written. (Not to mention the shameless ripoff of Mozart's aria from "The Shawshank Redemption") The sole redeeming factor of the entire movie is the color palette, which is largely backlit. The look does not possess the grit of "Saving Private Ryan" nor the vibrancy of "The Thin Red Line", but lies somewhere in between. A slightly washed-out scheme emphasizes the natural greens and browns of the surroundings while still permitting the occasional bright hues to shine, literally and figuratively. But not even that and the blatant flag-waving bookends are nearly enough to earn the movie a recommendation.
"The Great Raid" sat in the Miramax vaults for over a year, until the Weinsteins dumped it into theaters before their upcoming split with Disney. With two-thirds of the story wholly unnecessary and the rest filled with stock characters and situations, there is little wonder it might never have been released otherwise. This is one of the worst war movies I've ever seen, and that statement is coming from a guy who likes most any such film.
Bottom Line: I don't even recommend this for fans of the genre. Three of ten.