Turkish Delight.

Rating: 7/10 (15 September 2016)

An Australian water diviner, Russell Crowe, loses three sons at Gallipoli in Turkey and after the war travels to the battlefield to retrieve their corpses. I know. It sound lugubrious -- a heavenly choir, the vanquishing of red tape by empathy, as the water diviner divines the skeletons of his sons, one by drawn-out one, and schleps them back home to Australia, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.
Actually, it has plenty of color and dash and it doesn't turn out as expected. Shot in Australia and Turkey, there are some marvelous location shots as we're introduced not just to the battlefield but to Ottoman culture. A stunning shot of the interior of the blue mosque.
Among the Ottoman artifacts is Olga Kurylenko. Somewhere, a religious cult should be established in her honor, its symbol her sternoclavicular notch. What a dish. Body by Bernini, neck by Modigliani. Suddenly, that line from "Dr. Strangelove" -- "toe to toe with the Russkies" -- doesn't sound like such a bad idea.
The romance is subdued, as is Russell Crowe's performance. He's gained weight and lost definition since "L.A. Confidential" and his bulk now resembles that of John Wayne, a kind of massive heft that his brain orders about. He's quite professional as a director too, fond of overhead shots, but not too fond.
The editor should be fired. Sometimes it was easy to get lost. There are flash forwards of whirling dervishes only you don't know they're flash forwards. The whirling dervishes are the decorous public kind, clean and dazed looking, not the Dionysian wild men of the tribal areas. I don't know how they can do it without falling down after the first few minutes.
The film is more sympathetic to some of the Turkish soldiers now occupying the battlefield than it is with the British and Australian graves unit. The villains are Greeks, and there are scenes of battle resembling the perforated train sequence in "Lawrence of Arabia" and one or two echoes of "Young Churchill." The bloody combat scenes are disturbing in that they cause you to worry somewhat about just what the solution to the Middle East is.