Clichéd, Over-Dramatised and Very Over-Rated

Rating: Null/10 (30 August 2004)

In a year that saw the second instalment of the 'Lord Of The Rings' trilogy open, 'Chicago' burn the screens with raw carnal energy (i.e. Catherine Zeta Jones' breasts) and fanboys of the world unite with the arrival of the holy trinity that was 'Spiderman', 'Star Wars: Episode II - Attack Of The Clones' and 'Harry Potter and the Chamber Of Secrets', it's fair to say that any cinematic endeavour that planned to face off against this line up would have to make a stellar impression.
Unfortunately, 'We Were Soldiers' fails to live up to such standards. Given the calibre of talent (Gibson, Stowe, Kinnear, Elliot) on display here, we would have expected something with more resonance than the final product offers.
The picture, though having some good points to fall back on, does little more than to offer a very clichéd story with moments that make you slap your head rather than tug your heartstrings. One moment when, the night before he heads off to battle, Moore is praying with his children and his youngest asks him `Daddy, what's war?' is enough to make you poke your eye out on principle. The visceral equivalent of dipping you in honey before throwing you to the ants.
The direction offered is not well suited to the material at hand. Instead of showing a level of restraint offered by other war movies, Wallace chooses to shove your face into every gory detail. It even stretches so far as to showing each one of the soldier's wives as they find out that their husband is coming back in a box. Whilst war movies have always had a tendency to offer the message that war is hell, there is always a sneaking suspicion that maybe some people had their fingers crossed when they said it with this.
The main selling point for this movie seemed to be that it would show the conflict from both sides. Upon watching the film and seeing the single reference to a Vietnamese soldier writing to his wife, it looks as though this angle was added more as an afterthought when someone decided that they couldn't see the screen for all the Stars and Stripes that were in the way.
Ironically enough, the most interesting character of the movie was not a soldier at all, but a photographer played by Barry Pepper. Instead, little attention is given to him and the focus is pointed towards the soldiers, to show the camaraderie between the men fighting and their wives back home. By leaving Pepper as part of the background noise, you find yourself so swamped by the gung-ho fighting spirit before you've even seen the battlefield, that as soon as the shooting starts, the audience wants to turn away out of boredom, rather than horror.
This picture marks the first effort for Randall Wallace and Mel Gibson since their incredibly well received 1995 offering, 'Braveheart'. So keen were they to recapture the past glory, they even brought back several members of the team that made 'Braveheart' what it was. Though comparisons between these two films are not really fair, with the kind of success that the first expedition yielded, it's hard not to wonder if the bar was set a little too high to for this film to jump.