Well done if not overly-involving drama...

Rating: 7/10 (26 June 2006)

...that sparked my interest in researching a little-known rescue action that was a small but significant part of the WWII campaign to retake the Philippine Islands from Imperial Japan. I'll definitely be on the lookout for the books, "Ghost Soldiers," and "The Great Raid on Cabanatuan," from which the screenplay has been drawn. As others have mentioned, "The Great Raid" is no "Saving Private Ryan," but it treads a lot of the same ground in a different theater of that same terrible conflict, and does so quite effectively.
To digress just a moment, I'm intrigued by the unusually high ratings given this film by female IMDb voters, particularly those under 18 and over 45. I can only guess that a large number of these ladies are Filipinas supporting a film that does such a nice job of depicting the bravery and dedication of the Filipino underground resistance in their cooperative efforts with their American liberators.
Digressing further, I lived in the P.I. for a number of years as a young teenager. The experience gained me an international outlook that most Americans do not have. I was very pleased to see that "The Great Raid" gave the locals their due, refusing to lower itself to typical overwrought Hollywood "patriotism." In these paranoid and parochial post-9/11 days, that is extremely refreshing.
Director John Dahl is probably best known for the Matt Damon/Ed Norton vehicle, "Rounders," and to a lesser extent for his noir-ish films, "Red Rock West" and "The Last Seduction," but he acquits himself well with this very straightforward historical drama. The cast delivers a fine ensemble effort rather than "star" power, and the movie is all the better for it. Compare to when Ted Danson popped up in "Saving Private Ryan"--I almost expected everyone to start singing, "...everyone knows your name." I haven't found a war movie this unobtrusively engaging since "Stalingrad" (a look at the German perspective that I wholeheartedly recommend, btw). Dahl helms a clean and relatively simple staging of a rather grimy and no doubt more complex tale of individual heroism and coordinated derring-do than this film has room to encompass.
I'm somewhat bemused that the film was not shot on location in the Philippines. Politics, no doubt. Cost, possibly. Still, even this once-upon-a-time resident alien found little to question about the film's verisimilitude. I think all I missed was the throng of Jitneys I remember flooding the streets of Manila and its suburbs, and I realize that the Jitney explosion didn't really happen until after the war.
The combat sequences are handled well, and mercifully lacking the faux-documentary shaky-cam cinematography present in so many recent war films. The action is clean and understandable, thanks to some careful exposition, and the firefights are believably realistic without being overly gory. This isn't, after all, a film about the horrors of war so much as a film about the courage and determination that triumphantly overcome those horrors. Kudos to all involved.