We Were Liars.

Rating: 4/10 (23 November 2002)

An unfathomably bad movie. Endless successions of comic book realism (Mel needs no cover, now bow before him), cliches, distortions of the truth and historical revisionism (lies), poor or otherwise absent acting, and a shameful dose of American triumphalism. That's right! Not even a hint of apologism in the invasion of Vietnam. Not to mention to expected incompetence of 4000 well-trained NVAs in their own territory vs. the 395 ra-ra-ra U.S. soldiers. History re-written and the quality of each armed forces authentic qualities go down the drain with Gibsonite technolywood propaganda which appears to have come out straight out of the mouth of the U.S. Department of Defence 30 years ago (that's right, 30 years ago). The proaganda; the disjointedness of the story; the Mel Gibson overacting & his new identity as more-patriotic-than-GWB (and he's Australian, is he not); the dialogue lines -- 'Glad to die for my country' , I almost threw up. Glad to be involved & to die for in a meaningless war that would kill 2 million Vietnamese - but wait, Vietnamese lives are worth 1/1000000000 of an American one so it's okay. Anyway they shouldn't have been committing terrorist acts on U.S. soil and trying to invade... Just wait Holywood will rewrite the Indochina conflict in this manner in 10 years. Such a surprise though, that the Vietnameese, led by THEIR George Washington, Ho Chi Minh, were not prepared to be ruled by French colonialism, why would they want to live under an American one, they were fighting for their independence.
Alas for the three-sentence history lesson, those who like this movie, those who made this movie, clearly do not have the slightest care about history, just triumphalism and money. The glroious 395 Americans virtually annhilate the 4000 NVAs in cqc, again, was unfathomably painful to watch as it was reminiscent of so many, so - so many similar Holywood Vietnam propaganda movie - there are no shortage of these. The true gems: Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Hamburger Hill, etc., tend to be less submissive to the Holywood revisionisms. This movie is as far from these as Never Ending Story III is from Fellowship of the Ring. Pitiful, truly pitiful, and quite shameful too.