BEFORE: I can't stop now if I'm going to make it to the start of the horror block (Shock Block) on time, there are the same number of films to get through as there are days left in September - so to take anything even like a skip day, I would have to either double up or have watched a movie or two in advance already. The first one is quite difficult, but I just may have done the latter. But there's still another couple weeks to go before I can take even that kind of a break. Must keep moving, must keep watching, really there's no excuses because I've got like four or five days off in a row, and we're not going anywhere on this long weekend, so really, screw the beach and screw the cookouts, just stay home and watch movies, it's really cost effective. Maybe we'll go out to dinner tomorrow, but early "old person" dinner around 4 pm, you know, after the lunch crowd has cleared out and before the dinner rush shows up.
Bruce Willis carries over again from "Gasoline Alley".
THE PLOT: A lieutenant during World War II is captured and asked to defend a black prisoner of war falsely accused of murder.
AFTER: I wish I could have landed this one on Veterans Day or Memorial Day, but the chain wanted me to put this on Labor Day Weekend. I guess the chain wanted to remind me and everyone reading this how hard our armed forces work to keep us safe. That's a job, being in the army or navy or Marines or Coast Guard, so we're going to add that to the mental checklist this week, yesterday was detectives and porn filmmakers and tattoo artists, and those people work hard too. But probably not has hard as the people in our Armed Forces, so we salute them on this (almost) Labor Day.
I get the same vibe from this one as I did "Gasoline Alley", which is that this is exactly the type of film that you might watch after you've watched over 5,400 other ones, like no way is "Hart's War" a top priority for anyone to watch, not now and not in 2002 when it was released. It's low priority across the board, partially because it feels like a collection of plot points from OTHER World War II films, which is my way of saying that I feel like I've seen all of this before in better movies. There are parts that remind me of "The Great Escape", which of course is a great classic movie and I'll watch parts of it whenever it's on, I don't care if it's four hours long or whatever, if that's on TCM, well then please don't disturb me for the next four hours. I don't even care that I've seen it fifty or sixty or a hundred times, I love that movie. (Similarly, there was a "Star Wars" marathon on TBS this weekend, and I'm glad I found out about it so late, because otherwise, you know, there goes my weekend. I only re-watched most of Episode III, which is probably the one I've seen the fewest number of times, except maybe for Episode IX.)
But sure, you might say that all movies with World War II P.O.W.'s might share some things in common, clashing with the Nazis, trying to escape the camp, enduring terrible conditions, etc. But then there's another part that reminds me of "Red Tails", because a prominent character is a member of the Tuskegee Airmen. If you could imagine one of those airmen being shot down and then brought to a POW camp in Germany, you might imagine he would then have to bunk with other American servicemen, some who might be from non-integrated parts of the country, and who would be uneasy about or unwilling to share their space with a black man. It's not that hard to imagine especially since some areas of the country didn't pass any civil rights legislation until well after World War II, and racism of course has never fully gone away.
Other parts reminded me a bit of "Hogan's Heroes", especially how easy it was for the Americans to sneak out of the barracks whenever they needed to, either to ransack the German supplies or get what they needed to continue working on their tunnel. What we don't know at first, of course, is that Col. McNamara has a reason for everything that he does, whether it's putting Lt. Hart in the enlisted man's barracks so that he'll find out everything taking place there, or using the camp musical revue as a distraction to keep working on the tunnel. But when Staff Sgt. Bedford is found dead, and Lt. Scott (one of the black airmen) is accused of killing him, there's a decision to stage an American-style murder trial, in order to prevent the Nazis from just executing Scott outright - I mean, there's always a CHANCE that he didn't do it, and McNamara thinks this will serve as an even larger distraction to keep the Nazis away from the in-progress tunnel.
The commandant agrees to the trial, perhaps he is very curious about the American legal system and wants to see it in action, and Lt. Hart is called upon to be Scott's attorney, because he made it through two years of law school before enlisting or being drafted. However, Hart's defense starts to lean on the fact that Bedford was trading items with the Nazis, and of course the commandant doesn't need to know about this, so McNamara is forced to inform Hart that the whole trial is a sham, a distraction, the outcome doesn't matter, it's only meant to keep the enemy's focus in one place so they won't be snooping around anywhere else. Any suggestion during the trial that an American POW was collaborating with guards for any reason might not be what the commandant wants to hear, so Lt. Hart is not really able to defend his "client" to the best of his ability. Hart suspects that it was in fact McNamara who killed Bedford, because he was planning an escape of his own, which would have jeopardized the plan to get a large number of Americans out.
On the last day of the trial, the men planning to escape pretend to have food poisoning, but instead they're preparing to get out of the camp and blow up the nearby ammunition plant, which is a key military target, on their way out. This would not only strike a blow against the Nazi war effort, but also could allow the Americans to get further away from the camp while the Germans dealt with the burning building. It's not a terrible plan, but McNamara eventually realizes that there will be retaliation against the men who were left behind - starting with Hart, who confesses to killing Bedford himself to try to cause a mistrial. However, when the commandant notices that there are fewer prisoners present at the trial than usual, he kind of puts two and two together and threatens to execute everyone participating in the trial. It's only when McNamara comes back and takes full responsibility for the escape plot, essentially sacrificing himself, that the commandant decides to focus his retribution on the mastermind of the plot and spare the others. Well, really, all of the prisoners have value, they can be traded for the release of German prisoners - nobody really knows that the war's going to end in three months, but maybe they've got some kind of feeling about that.
You could consider watching this movie as a time-saver, before some streaming service like Netflix turns this into a 3-season series with 36 episodes. The plot is at least that complex, it could easily be expanded to series length, just add a few more twists and turns. Would we NEED that? Of course not, but they're already remaking the "Harry Potter" films as a series of mini-series, and further long-form adaptations of short-form movies are on the way.
Directed by Gregory Hoblit (director of "Untraceable" and "Primal Fear")
Also starring Colin Farrell (last seen in "The Banshees of Inisherin"), Terrence Howard (last seen in "Awake"), Cole Hauser (last seen in "Tears of the Sun"), Marcel Iures (last seen in "Layer Cake"), Linus Roache (last seen in "The Wings of the Dove"), Vicellous Shannon (last seen in "Deep Cover" (1992)), Maury Sterling (last seen in "Bulletproof"), Sam Jaeger (last seen in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"), Scott Michael Campbell (last seen in "Small Town Saturday Night"), Rory Cochrane (last seen in "Encounter"), Sebastian Tillinger (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Rick Ravanello (last seen in "Nick Fury: Agent of Shield"), Adrian Grenier (last seen in "Affairs of State"), Michael Weston (last seen in "Crank: High Voltage"), Joe Spano (last seen in "Primal Fear"), Sam Worthington (last seen in "Sigourney Weaver, the Most Iconic Action Heroine"), Brad Hunt (last seen in "Mulholland Falls"), Rualdhri Conroy (last seen in "The Professor and the Madman"), Tony Devlin, Michael Landes (last seen in "Lakeview Terrace"), David Barrass (last seen in "Flawless"), Gary Gold (last seen in "The Whole Nine Yards"), Danny Babington, Holger Handtke (last seen in "Enemy at the Gates"), Dan van Husen (ditto), Grey Williams, Rene Ifrah, Steve Sarossy, Rocky Marshall (last seen in "Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens"), Christian Kahrmann, Jim Boeven, Georg Vietje, Lukas Kantor, Jakub Zdenek, Jan Nemejovsky (last seen in "The Prince and Me"), Jan Marsik, Bohumil Svarc (last seen in "The Omen" (2006)), Jiri Marla Sieber (last seen in "Blade II"), Dugald Bruce-Lockhart (last seen in "From Time to Time"), Jan Jakubec, Michael Beran, Grant George
RATING: 5 out of 10 frozen corpses from the Battle of the Bulge
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