One Of My Favourite Mel Gibson Performances

Rating: 8/10 (4 February 2015)

We Were Soldiers (2002)
Plot In A Paragraph: Focusing on the Battle of Ia Drang on November 14, 1965. It is based on the book We Were Soldiers Once And Young by Lieutenant General (Ret.) Hal Moore and reporter Joseph L. Galloway, both of whom were at the battle.
This is quite simply one of my favourite war movies, Gibson's performance is the core of the movie, and is one of his best performances. I love his reaction to a certain characters death, almost no words except "He died keeping my promise" and pure raw emotion. Chris Klein gives the performance of his career, Sam Elliot is his usual brilliant self, uttering fine great dialogue, whilst Madeline Stowe, Greg Kinnear Barry Pepper and Kerri Russell all of stellar support. There are some strong female performances featured here, not commonly found in a war movie!! This is brilliantly shot, directed and scored.
It does have a few cliché moments, but it's hard to criticise a movie for something so little, when it gets so much right.
For some reason, audiences didn't flock to this one, it only grossed $78 million at the domestic box office, to end 2002 as the 34th highest grossing movie of the year. Which for a Gibson led movie, was pretty low for the time.
Gibson is truly a great actor, and hopefully he can sort his personal problems and demons out, because as we all know Hollywood loves comebacks.