Several near-brilliant, terrifyingly suspenseful action sequences are marred by rampant, incessant jingoism of the most uncomfortable order. The Serbian people are depicted as a nation of ruthless and untrustworthy murderers who delight in the slaughter of innocents. While I will admit my knowledge of all the things going on in Bosnia during the '80s and '90s is very slim, it's been my experience that no war is as cut-and-dry as the U.S. would like to pretend it is. I guess at this point in my life I'm much more interested in demystifying war and struggles between nations rather than continuing to mythologize our involvement in said things.
There's an interesting moment partway through the film, when a NATO admiral tells a US admiral something about the US being obsessed with getting their soldiers back, but what if getting this one man back costs thousands of lives later? This is, rather obviously, a real concern and something the movie would've done well to explore. The cavalier attitude of the U.S. in its involvement in foreign policy and peacekeeping is absolutely worth examining, but soon after this line is uttered the NATO admiral is made to look weak and the US admiral, played by Gene Hackman, to look self-sacrificing, strong, and heroic. And the idea of one man's life costing thousands is averted, as suddenly main character Owen Wilson also has vital information that can SAVE thousands of lives and the insidious Serbians have already completely violated the tenuous peace treaty anyway, so GO USA! USA! and save that dude no matter what the cost!
Still, as noted above, many of the action set pieces are occasionally astounding works of spatial relations and terror. I only wish the movie could've focused on them, rather than dragging the awkward politics and hammily-handled backroom politics into it. John Moore would later go on to do another, occasionally effective if weirdly racist, remake of The Flight of the Phoenix before making Max Payne, a movie that eschews any kind of political commentary for a purity of narrative that I think is a pretty excellent and underrated movie. Here's hoping for more like that and less like this from him in the future.
I dunno, I think that purposefully avoiding issues of politics when dealing with the Balkans (or anywhere, really) would feel more awkward and falsely constructed than what you mention above. I mean, you can't really avoid politics, can you?
ReplyDeleteMax Payne is probably a better video game than movie.
Yeah, I suppose you're right. What I think I meant was, I want those well-designed set pieces and what not in a different movie that is not at all about weirdo U.S. soldiers "trapped in Foreign Lands." Or that it took a more interesting and balanced approach, and didn't just make up some shit to make it all okay at the end that everyone was disobeying orders b/c it ends up getting all the bad guys tried for war crimes and YAY GOOD GUYS WIN. This review is actually one of the worst-written I think I've put up. I'll actually try to fix it later, but it's pretty dismal. I mostly wanted to just bang it out b/c it was my 50th review on this site, which is a pretty cool number to have reached this quickly.
ReplyDeleteI actually like Max Payne, the movie, better than Max Payne, the video game. I think the movie does a pretty good job of not being an action movie based on a video game that was a rehash of John Woo action movies. Like, I actually think the ending is pretty awesome and functions as a much more interesting comment on the nature of revenge movies and the problems there are with finding them cathartic, which is almost the opposite of the xenophobia rampant in both this movie and The Flight of the Phoenix.
Unfortunately it looks like his next movie is about soldiers in Afghanistan fighting zombie vampires or something?