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'The Great Raid': The real story deserves better

By ROGER MOORE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"The Great Raid" should have made a great movie. That it doesn't says something about the studio that never should have made it, the director whose research seems limited to old John Wayne movies, and a cast more at home on the catwalks of male modeldom than in a POW camp where they've been starved for three years.

Miramax

'The Great Raid'

The verdict: A great story, but not a great movie.

Director: John Dahl
Starring: Benjamin Bratt, James Franco, Connie Nielsen, Joseph Fiennes, Mark Consuelos
Release date: August 12, 2005
Rating: R for strong war violence and brief language.
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No wonder this sat on the shelf for more than two years. It's damaged goods, fit only to tumble out as part of the "change in management" Miramax fire sale.

"The Great Raid" is about a nearly forgotten corner of World War II history, a daring U.S. Army Rangers rescue of Bataan Death March survivors in the Philippines.

The largest surrender of U.S. forces ever had led to thousands interred in POW camps all over the Philippines — those who survived a barbaric march to the camps, a march their Japanese captors intended to kill them off. Near the end of the war, only a few were left. With U.S. forces back in the islands and rescue imminent, the Japanese had taken to mass murder to get rid of the prisoners. Rangers were sent 30 miles behind enemy lines to save 500 Americans before the Japanese could wipe them out.

Benjamin Bratt is properly stoic as the commander of the force that takes on the job. James Franco is adequate as the brains of the mission, the planner. Joseph Fiennes suffers wanly as the emaciated, malarial commanding officer of the prisoners in the camp. And Connie Nielsen is the American nurse who stayed behind to help run the resistance, right under the noses of the Japanese.

Much of this really happened. But director John Dahl ("Joy Ride") and the screenwriters have conjured up a dreary, old-fashioned "last roundup" of war movie and prisoner-of-war movie cliches, small but forgivable sins. Less forgivable is how Dahl squanders tension for an hour and a half cutting between the suffering prisoners and resistance intrigues in Manila, the long march of the Rangers and a fictionalized romance story that might have made a nice little movie by itself.

Adding that to this grab bag of WWII drama just drags down the whole.

The film is a catalog of atrocities committed by a Z-list of Asian actors.

Bratt lights and re-lights his pipe, makes the odd speech — "You're the best-trained, least-proven battalion in this man's Army."

We also get the "Yer not leavin' me behind on this mission, Cap'n" speech, and POWs who spend their hours gossiping over some affair the major (Fiennes) didn't actually have with the nurse running the resistance, played to good effect by Nielsen.

But then there's Franco's callow and off-pitch voice-over narration.

Though the basic facts check out as accurate, the whole enterprise rings false. After all the Vietnam movies that were, in fact, shot in the Philippines, "The Great Raid" gives us a Philippines that looks nothing like the jungled real thing. It was filmed in the part of Australia that looks like South Georgia.

A great story filled with real heroics deserves better than this. The only thing this vestige of the Miramax nameplate proves is that Miramax had no stomach for making a fairly conventional war movie, and neither did Dahl.