Joshua fit the battle

Rating: 5/10 (2 January 2016)

Russell Crowe's directorial debut shows that he has skill behind as well as in front of the camera but ultimately, even bearing the legend "inspired by true events", in the end this well-meaning film ran away from itself as the unexpected, coincidental and just plain ridiculous piled up the longer it went on.
The first scenes of Crowe himself show him divining water in the Australian outback which somehow qualifies him to later pick out the long buried remains of two of his three soldier sons at the infamous Gallipoli battlefield. Miraculously, although shot too in battle shoulder to shoulder with his brothers, the third son survives, although not before witnessing his siblings' excruciating deaths and also not without an overwhelming sense of guilt not just because his brothers have put themselves in harm's way by trying to rescue him in the first place but because of the drastic step he has to take to take to ease the pain of one of them.
Crowe also loses his wife firstly to insanity no doubt brought on by the grief over her loss and then to suicide when she finally can't go on. With nothing left to live for, Crowe embarks on his unlikely mission to bring his sons's remains back home to bury alongside their mother, stubbornly defying officialdom as personified by the officer class he encounters in the Australian, British and even the Turkish armies. He also hooks up with a young, pretty, Turkish war widow-hotelier, at her hotel, where he stays, she herself being coerced into an undesired arranged marriage with her late husband's brother. Her young son tricks Crowe into staying at their hotel and it's not too long before he strikes up a friendship with the mischievous youngster.
I liked must of the early scenes, in particular the moving one where Crowe's wandered wife implores him to read from the Arabian Nights to the obviously empty beds of their children. However the narrative starts to lose credibility when he defends the young widow's honour, hooks up with a couple of Turkish vets on the run from their territorial rivals the Greeks and accomplishes a series of death-defying escapes as he homes in on his surviving son.
Beautifully shot and well acted as it is, like I said the only things more clichÃ©d than the action sequences at the end were some excerpts from the dialogue too. Crowe knows where to put the camera to tell his story and is well supported by a convincing cast too. However in the final round-up, I just couldn't buy into the would-be happy endings which while they may be the long-suffering Crowe's just reward, in the end seemed too sentimental as well as unbelievable to, forgive the pun, hold water.
All it needed to make this film work better was a more grounded narrative as it winged its way to an upbeat conclusion. Crowe's attempt at an outback epic in the end though well intended and made fell short at the writing stage.