We Were Country-Loving Fascists

Rating: 1/10 (3 March 2002)

Without getting into too many more details than necessary, it should be said that this movie was sexist, racist, badly cast, poorly photographed, and so terribly scored it hurts. To make matters worse, the dialogue was generally didactic, uncreative, and therefore unbelievable.
**WARNING: Some spoilers ahead**
The overbearing Catholicism didn't help either; particularly when referring to the enemy as "heathens" in one of Gibson's many moments of prayer in this feature.
None of the women's roles in this film had any substance or character. This does not separate them from the men, but it is particularly important to note because the film never spends enough time with them to develop their characters in the first place. It is as if the film is only hopelessly seeking to reach a wider audience than its competitor, Scott's Black Hawk Down, by recognizing that good Christian soldiers have good Christian wives at home, who weep when they die. Furthermore, that one such wife would mistakenly assume that a sign for "whites only", at a local laundromat, was referring to the type of laundry allowed is simply embarrassing. (This may have been an attempt by Wallace to set his film in its specific time period as music from the early sixties was completely absent from the movie. Either way: embarrassing.)
Racial issues, as with the women's roles, are so poorly dealt with in this film that it is unclear as to why the topic surfaces at all. Wallace's attempt to seem "multi-cultural" by having Gibson directly address the very mixed-racial nature of his unit (this is what I meant by didactic) is completely undermined by the lack of non-white actors in any of the leading roles. These other ethnicities only surface to be mutilated by typically exploitative Hollywood war violence, later in the picture.
It is conceivable that Wallace and Gibson were simply unable to get any talented non-white actors interested in their project, particularly because the rest of their casting decisions are unlikely choices for a war movie. Both Chris Klein and Greg Kinnear appear out of their respective elements here. This, in all fairness, may have been the intention of the filmmakers as both roles present an over-exaggerated contrast to that of Sam Elliot's roll as a hard-nosed and frequently amusing rip-off of Lee Marvin. For Lee Marvin fans, unfortunately, Elliot's presence only serves as a reminder that the world of cinema has seen so many superior, though less graphic, war movies before this.
In fact, possibly the film's greatest inferiority with respect to its most recent counterparts is its often uninspiringly composed and poorly lit cinematography. Two or three shots (I'm not sure which) that stand out as particularly amateur are one master shot of an evening dinner/dance (possibly the only scene in which the soldiers, other than Gibson and Klein, actually interact with their wives) that is just so poorly lit that even the American flag (center frame) looks weak and tired. The other shot (or shots) takes place as Gibson and the other soldiers are waiting for the bus. In one shot, unreasonably bright practicals light the soldiers and in (possibly) another they shed light on three very large radio antennas, for no apparent reason. That is, unless Wallace was trying, in an extremely amateur fashion, to emphasize the solid (and extremely phallic) nature of the US soldier that is prepared for war.
As the skilled combination of sight and sound lie at the heart of great cinema, it can be said that the quality of the cinematography may have been bearable had the musical score not been so gut-wrenchingly awful. One moment they're building suspense by ripping off Hans Zimmer's virtuoso score from a better war film, Mallick's The Thin Red Line, the next moment (as well as three more times through out the picture) they're using a completely inappropriate Scottish (?) ballad that is totally distracting from the scenes it accompanies. This ballad was probably meant to remind us that Wallace and Gibson once teamed up to make a film that was actually pretty good.
As much as I was truly nauseated by this picture I must concede that the rest of the audience, as well as the majority of reviewers on IMDB, seems to have been sincerely touched by its efforts. I will probably never truly understand why. However, one positive thing that I can say with regard to this picture is that it seems now that Mel Gibson may be only one or two contrived epics away from topping Kevin Costner's brilliantly (and I do mean brilliantly) cliched epic, The Postman. If this be his goal, I wish Mr. Gibson the best of luck.