Crap on a stick

Rating: 1/10 (15 January 1999)

First off, before I go into how bad this film is let me state the director is a master when it comes to the battle scenes. They are superb. Some of the best ever. The rest is a waste o time. There are some good performances given the size of the parts, but they are far and few. Koteas, Nolte and Cusack are the only actors worth anything in the film, and neither of them have too large of parts. The director tries to get across some much in so much time but it gets lost in its own failed symbolism. This film is actually painful to watch because of that. You will find yourself praying for the battle scenes, and discover yourself muttering swears when a narration begins or a cut scene to a soldier's wife. If one were to ignore the "message" the director is trying to share and look at the film as simply a film to watch and be entertained by you'll find nothing. That is why the symbolism fails, the message fails, and the movie is hard to watch. Because beneath all the symbols and life questioning there is nothing. No plot, no real main characters to attach yourself to, or care about. It's just a march through a jungle. And perhaps that's what the director wanted, an insufferable march through the jungle, trying to show a viewer the crap each soldier went through, however it doesn't shine through, instead it's me guessing at perhaps that's the point. I love a film that questions life, and this film does that. However it does it as an old English novel would. The kind of novel near impossible to read because the language has changed so much in six hundred years. This film had a lot of potential, however it got lost in itself and became perhaps the biggest disappointment I've had in a long while.