For the most part, I am a big believer in separating the art from the artist. There are some, however, where that is more difficult than others. Mel Gibson is one such figure. Why, then, did I watch We Were Soldiers? The last time I watched one of Gibson’s movies, it was The Year of Living Dangerously, a movie made when Gibson was young enough that I could at least pretend he was someone else. But I am really trying to get as many movies as possible for that Fill-in Filmography poster, and there are two movies on there that are listed as “based on true stories” and “wartime/upheaval” that Gibson worked on in some capacity. One, Hacksaw Ridge, is leaving HBO Max at the end of the month. The other, We Were Soldiers, is leaving Netflix at the end of the February. Why not knock both off in a single weekend and be done with them?
Besides, I could always say I was watching this one for Sam Elliot and Greg Kinnear.
Colonel Hal Moore (Gibson) is the new officer in charge of a new Air Cavalry unit working out of Fort Benning, Georgia. He has some ideas on how to better utilize attack helicopters in combat. A very devout Christian who prays with his kids before bed, he has a job to do in teaching his men a new form of combat. He has his work cut out for him. He and his people are soon shipped off to Vietnam, near where a French patrol had been killed to a man by a North Vietnamese attack. Then about 45 minutes into a movie that runs another 90 after that, the same Vietnamese army attacks Moore’s forces. Much of the rest of the movie shows Moore doing what he can to keep his dwindling forces from being completely wiped out while both surrounded and heavily outnumbered.
Also, every so often the movie flashes back to Fort Benning where Moore’s wife Julia (Madeline Stowe) takes it upon herself to deliver the telegrams letting the women around the base she has befriended know their husbands were dying during the battle.
I honestly wasn’t impressed much by this movie. Everything about it seems fine, but not much better than fine. Writer/director Randall Wallace had previously written the screenplay for Gibson’s Braveheart before adapting the real Hal Moore’s memoir for the screen, and like with that movie, this one is not afraid to spill blood. It’s not in the neighborhood of, say, Rambo, but the film opens with the French soldiers dying bloodily, particularly a bugler who took a bullet through the throat while blowing his horn to alert the others. It’s that kind of movie, at least in terms of violence, and more than half of it is devoted to the Battle of la Drang. I will say Wallace does portray the North Vietnamese as more than a faceless enemy. One soldier is seen tucking away a photo of his girl back home like an American G.L. would, and the North Vietnamese commanding officer (Đơn Dương) is shown to be a smart tactician, matching wits with Moore while the two never actually meet before summing up the future of America’s involvement in Vietnam in a rather tragic tone, saying that he and his people won’t be giving up, but there will be a lot of death on all sides until the Americans eventually realize that.
But still, there was something about this movie that felt a little flat. A meeting early in the film of the soldiers’ wives as they got to know each other had one unknowingly say she found a laundromat that will only let the customers clean their whites as stated on a sign out front until the lone African American woman present more or less explains the sign was aimed at her, not their clothes, and there’s some indignation from the first woman until the black woman explains why she’s still proud of her husband. The whole scene struck me as a bit of nonsense. Perhaps the exchange went down as shown in the movie, but I had a hard time believing the first woman didn’t know about Jim Crow. In fact, despite the fact there were more than a few familiar faces in the supporting cast, including the likes of Jon Hamm, Chris Klein, Clark Gregg, Keri Russell, and Greg Kinnear, the only one I thought got anything like character development was Barry Pepper’s inbeded war correspondent who soon finds himself picking up a gun himself and joining in on a counterattack. And the only performance that really stuck out was Sam Elliot’s turn as Moore’s Sergeant Major, and he seemed more like a parody of Robert Duvall’s character from Apocalypse Now, right down to the fact he’s the only one who not only doesn’t seem to dive for cover while still remaining more or less untouched as NVA troops run at him and his people from all sides. The battle is done rather impressively, but that was about all I can say really stood out to me in a good way. The rest just felt rather average in execution.
Grade: C+
0 Comments