evan-19

Great B-movies are those genre pieces that dare to go thematically where many A-list movies shy away lest they alienate some of their audience. This taught submarine thriller explores the notion that, at war, you can find very bad men among the good guys just as you can find good people among the enemy. Obviously notions that junk like "U-571" wouldn't dare contemplate.

Credit the eerie script by Darren Aronofsky (among others) for creating a tight, claustrophobic scenario and identifiable characters. The witty dialogue offers just the right amount of comedy relief while David Twohy's direction builds suspense slowly until the horrific climax. The last image of this film carries the moral weight of a Greek tragedy; you really feel that justice has been served.

This is not a joke. This movie will make you look fondly upon Showgirls. It will make you reconsider Rollerball. It will make you appreciate Melanie Griffith's acting. This absolute muddled mess of an excuse of a joke of a film feels so recut and re-edited as to make any possibility of coherency moot. The film (shot in Luxembourg, doubling for New York) is laden with rotting European buildings and bizarrely accented supporting actors. The plot (ha!) deals with a serial killer who broadcasts his murders live on the web but can never be tracked down because -- get this -- he changes servers every time. One of his victims' ghosts takes over the internet in an effort to wreak vengeance on her killer. Which begs any number of questions: why doesn't the ghost go after the killer directly, why does the ghost kill cops trying to catch the killer and why doesn't the ghost -- who has the power to communicate over the net -- simply reveal the killer's whereabouts to the police?

Oh, that's right. There wouldn't be any movie if it made sense.

"The Dirty Dozen" is really two movies: the first half is a hilarious, well-acted, thoroughly entertaining romp. That's probably what makes the second half so horrendous. The last half-hour deals with how the "heroes" we've come to like basically burn a bunch of helpless women to death. If this was a German film, circa the forties, we would see it as absolute confirmation of the fundamental evils of Naziism. But because it's an American film and those are "our" boys, not only don't we condemn it, we actually praise it.

Sorry, but you can't have it both ways.