The Veteran

One of the worst films I've ever seen that purports to be about Vietnam or Veterans. No, wait... it's just a poor film in every way.

The writing is painfully bad, the acting is weak, and the scenes in Vietnam (or was it Thailand or the Philippines?) were wasted. If you could get back to Vietnam to film the Majestic hotel, why not something more than that? Virtually the entire film takes place in a hotel room in Saigon with some of the most painful dialogue you'll ever see on screen. It's as if it's trying to be a parody of all bad spy-war films.

They obviously did NOT bother is a military consultant or technical adviser for the combat scenes. It would be impossible to write a spoiler because by the end you couldn't care less what happens. It is just awful.

Usually I am ready to champion a film that's been pretty much slagged off by everyone else. I mean, it only had 215 votes and, besides, it has Ally Sheedy in it. Surely it can't be that bad?! Sorry to say but it was indeed exceedingly low rent at best. I was pretty unconvinced from the word "go". The opening cab ride, where a short news flash on the car radio takes the entire journey, suddenly had me seeing the flashing red lights that portend a real stinker. Nothing about any of the characters had any sense of authenticity and you could not really care about any of them. The war scenes were hoke and the whole thing is a badly written, badly directed and badly acted mess. There are plenty of ways to spend an hour and a half. I wouldn't waste it watching this.

This is a pretty good movie. Not the best ever, but definitely underrated with just 3*. It is good acting, nothing fancy or shocking in the script, it just makes you think. It is not a classical Vietnam war movie ( as The Platoon) or post Vietnam war trauma movie (Deer Hunter, Born on 4th of July), you just have to see it for yourself. Its not only M Ironside with the good acting, its also the supporting actors. And by the way, I haven't seen M Ironside for a long time, does he appear in any good movie lately?!?! I voted it 7*, still maybe it worths just 5 or 6, but I wanted to improve the rate, it obviously worths more than 3*! However, maybe its not quite connected to this specific movie, but I wonder how can it be rated only 3*! Usually, before watching a movie I check on IMDb's site and almost never watch movies rated less than 4 or 5*, I made an exception with this one (I just felt it) and now I don't feel that it was wasted time! Is it possible that I ignored some other underrated movies?! I'll have to check! As for 'The Veteran', if you are not a Rambo fan, then you will like the war scenes shown in the characters' flashbacks. I have actually felt that those ordinary guys (regardless that they were marines) were facing death at each step, and these are not just empty words. I've felt the same watching 'The Platoon', but you cant draw a parallel between the 2 movies, they are totally different, its just how it made me feel when I imagined myself in their skin.

The Vetern isn't too bad.what I found interesting is that they actually blended 2 movies. All the scenes of the soldiers are from a movie called Going Back from 2001

The Vietnam War, for some reason, seems to be the favorite subject of veteran Canadian director Sidney J. Furie, who has made at least 5 movies covering various themes of the war over the years. He does deserve credit for making probably the very first serious Vietnam War film (The Boys in Company C) in 1978, and the first movie portraying the service of women in the war (Purple Hearts). Though this movie may not stack up with the operatic likes of "Platoon" and "The Deer Hunter", I actually found myself drawn into this one, right through the twist ending.

Now, I'm not a fan of the recent trend in M. Night Shyamalan-style twist endings in one big-budget Hollywood flick after another; if a storyline is compelling enough by itself, it shouldn't require a cop-out ending which makes everything before it null and void. However, with the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth accusations of Presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004, as well as the Presidential campaign of John McCain and the myriad accusations leveled against Obama and Bill Clinton for their past, I did think this ending was kind of interesting and topical. Like the ending of "The Boys in Company C," it encapsulates much of the mixed-up political feelings Americans have about that war and politics in general.

The acting here by Bobby Hosea and Michael Ironside is amazingly good. If you watch this without the expectations of a big-budget Hollywood epic, you are much more likely to enjoy it.