Slow, but never boring

Rating: 7/10 (20 November 2007)

I have noticed that war movies tend to fall in one out of three categories. There movies that show how boring war can be between violent outbursts of combat. There are movies that show how horrible war is with realistic depiction of wounds and combat. And there are action movies that use the backdrop of war for large scale pyrotechnics. "The Great Raid" however sidesteps this and shows something completely different. Instead of these loud battles of bouts of boredom we are shown how a carefully planned strategy is thought up and finally executed in the film's most exciting sequence. Seeing war as a precisely calculated battle of wits and nerves is not something that the big screen has not shown us too often.
However, this film, which runs at over two hours, has a few too many subplots. Well, maybe not too many subplots since they are all clearly relevant, but the screen time they are given versus the screen time of the soldiers performing the raid, makes this a movie with essentially no subplots, but three parallel plots. Thus the suspense of the upcoming raid is largely obscured. We are only told that the soldiers have thirty miles of enemy patrolled territory to cross, but aren't quite shown. The constant nerve wracking threat of discovery isn't really done justice here and that thirty miles seems to go by rather smoothly. Though seeing that the scenes of the soldiers creeping their way through patrolled enemy territory are cut out in order to show us the two parallel plots - one showing the inside of the prison camp and the other the smuggling of medicine into it - there is enough here to keep the viewer interested.
In the end, the film is more than worth it and easily could have been much worse. For instance, the film is not just about the courage of American soldiers, but the Filipino underground resistance is shown in the same fair light. This makes for good historical accuracy and surprisingly convincing military accuracy. So even if the suspense is a bit lax, "The Great Raid" has enough of what is needed for a compelling story from the books of military history. --- 7/10
Rated R for violence. Ages 13+