If it was meant to show how self-serving grifters are touched to finer issues, it merely stumbles into that change. A transformation a la Frank Capra wouldn't have helped, but in this screenplay the change in Gates and his group almost seems an afterthought, to sweeten a cynical film. Still, Russell does so well by his sub-text that the flaws in the text itself become less bothersome. Yes, it is hell, but, what may be even worse, it makes men crazy. I have never been in a war, but I have known plenty who have been, and I have heard.
War makes men do things, quite apart from what they are supposed to be doing, that are crazy.
It happens in a different terrain to persons who once were human and will, with luck, get back there. The sharpest instance of this view is when the American prisoner of the Iraqis finds a cell phone in the bunker room and speaks to his wife in their Detroit kitchen who has their baby in her arms. The collision of the two places, the kitchen and the bunker, is not between peace and war but between sanity and insanity. Two performances stand out. George Clooney, as Gates, shows yet again that he was born to be a leading man in film.