a disposable war movie?

Rating: 4/10 (17 October 2007)

This is a pretty disappointing movie considering the kind of resources that were spent on it and the apparent care that went into the production. It looks fantastic but there just is not a real core of human feeling, at least nothing that I personally could connect to. Partly that's because the first half of the film seems to have a very confused narrative focus. It's partly the film about a bitter Marine (Nicholas Cage) who gets injured and has to take a relatively peaceful assignment with a group of Native Americans who are enlisted by the Marines so that their language can be used as a basis for an unbreakable code. For no particularly compelling reason the story focuses on Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach) and a friend he brings along to the war.
Beach put in a decent performance but doesn't have much to work with. There's a lot of talk about past racial history and the irony of the fact that the "Indians" are now fighting with the Americans. One character even speculates about how we might be sitting here 50 years from now with the Japanese trying to figure out "how to kick somebody else's butt" (or words to that effect). Stuff like this is really annoying to me because it's not the kind of thing that anyone would be talking about in that situation; it's obviously just some junk they thought would seem ironic to people nowadays. So much of the dialog in this movie is forced and awkward like that. The movie is crushed beneath the weight of its pretenses. After the end of the film there's a beautiful shot of Cage in a close-up with a weary expression on his face. I saw that and I said "oh, there's the performance! Why don't I remember him showing his character like that in the actual movie?" And it's because the movie doesn't even dare to stop long enough or to slow down so that you can appreciate anything that's happening. From the very first scenes it's just action action action, and I really felt a bit sick especially as the film went on because it seemed to me to blur the lines between action and violence. Kind of like "Rambo II" and about equally worthless, although at least that film didn't burden itself with hokey reflections of racial politics  and perhaps more significantly it didn't take place during a real conflict. My girlfriend (who has a brother in Iraq) was so offended by the tone and style of the movie that we got in an argument just because I wanted to finish it. I think if you just wanted to see this as an action movie and ignore all the other elements it could be an OK action movie. But since this movie pretends and/or attempts to be much more and fails so horribly I would not recommend it to anyone. It didn't make me feel anything dramatic until maybe the very end because it never felt like anything more than a video game shoot-em-up. I can't say it's a reprehensible movie without watching it again, but it made me feel pretty uncomfortable in an unconstructive way if you know what I mean.