Great Performances Wasted by Bad Script, Heavy-Handed Direction

Rating: 4/10 (15 October 2003)

Hey, kids. Get out your war movies cliches checklists and count along with me. Let's see, we have the guy whose first line is his wife had a baby. He's gonna die, isn't he? Yup. And so's - in slo-mo - the guy carrying his wounded friend, right? Check. The cut aways to the women at home getting the news? The leader's "it should have been me" speech? The dying soldier whispering, "Tell my daddy I love him"? The enemy leader, after the battle, predicting the course of the rest of the war? Check, check, check, check. The soldier dying by throwing himself on a grenade? Oh, no, wait. NOBODY could call that one up. It's too much. There are CAVE PAINTINGS with that cliche. It's too... my God, they did that, too.
The biggest shame of "We Were Soldiers" is its waste of great performances. Mel Gibson doesn't turn in a career-best performance, but this is in his upper third. Greg Kinnear is almost unrecognizable in a complete departure from his earlier work. Sam Elliott and Barry Pepper are... well, Sam Elliott and Barry Pepper. It's just.... Man. When Pepper gives the "I came here to make the people in America understand" speech, Pepper's giving it his all, but I roll my eyes hard enough to sprain an optic muscle or two.
What's lacking is talent behind the camera. "Saving Private Ryan" is just as cliched, but Spielberg uses those cliches better than anyone before - one might hope, to end the need ever to repeat them. Writer-director Randall Wallace (who also wrote "Pearl Harbor" - and if that's not a giant candy-apple red warning flag, I don't know what is) doesn't seem to think so. And his delivery is painful. There are moments - like Pepper's photographic montage, or the scene at the end with the press corps that doesn't "get it," that are so cheesy as to almost become parody. The movie a comedy troupe might make if they wanted to send up horrible war movies. And it WOULD be funny, if it weren't so realistic. Just as World War II veterans spoke of "Pearl Harbor"'s realism, some Vietnam veterans have talked about the realism of this film's action. But the realism and the performances make the whole mess WORSE. They add earnestness to the tripe, and nothing's worse than humorless camp.
Somewhere between the brooding navel-gazing of "Full Metal Jacket" and "Apocalypse Now" (both of which I loved, although I'd never consider them "realistic" portrayals of Vietnam or any war) and the jingoistic propaganda of "The Green Berets" and "Rambo," (the latter of which I liked), there's a Vietnam movie to be made that shows soldiers of both sides as humans in an inhuman situation. This ain't it. And until someone has the guts and talent to pull off, say, an adaptation of Tim O'Brien's THE THINGS THEY CARRIED, we may not see such a film for a while.