Behind Enemy Lines

I remember seeing this movie late one night. There was nothing else to watch, so I gave this a shot. I was pleasantly surprised. No, it does not have a big budget, so it is not going to rival a Hollywood blockbuster. If one goes into not expecting top of the line acting, cinematography, sound, and set then one probably won't be disappointed.

This is a B movie, so expect B move quality, not Spielberg. The plot was good, Thomas Ian Griffith is underrated. His martial arts skills are actually pretty good. He is not a small man, like Van Damme or Bruce Willis, but a physically imposing specimen, like Dolph Lundgren. Thisis the first movie Iremember seeing him in and I was impressed. If you want a way to kill an hour and a half, watch it.

My friends, this is an incredibly insipid movie. How many Vietnam-era flicks are gonna be produced before someone eventually decides "enough is enough"? Ignoring such films as "Platoon" or "Apocalypse Now" or "The Deer Hunter" (truly splendid examples of cinema within the genre) and also ignoring the first "Rambo" film (a movie I embarrasingly admit to having enjoyed), I have this suspicion that some shady, weasel-like producer in sunny So. California thought to himself "Hey! I know how to make a quick buck! I'll screw a few investors outta a couple hundred grand and I'll make a, uhh... yeah! I'll make a 'Nam flick!"

Phuuleeze! Give it a rest, willya? The only people who would possibly find this movie worth watching are pre-pubescent little boys living in Idaho.

So there seems to be some debate about whether this is made-for-TV or a B movie. Well, it appears to have been made for the cinema but with writers and a director not used to producing B movie quality.

The two lead actors, Thomas Ian Griffith as Mike Weston, and Chris Mulkey as Jones, are competent, the minor ones less so. If the Vietnamese actors look like Philippinos, there is a reason for that! The camera-work is pretty good, though I could use less slo-mo, and the action scenes are frequent and watchable.

The main problem is the writing. The basic story is too stupid to be worth describing. The US military is portrayed as full of low-intellect young men who can't put a sentence together without profanity. I wondered if there was some irony there but I don't think so.

Sit back and enjoy the action, if you can?

The guy/gal who writes the teaser for Cinemax screwed up again. I was hoping to get a good laugh watch Owen Wilson pretend to be a Navy officer in Behind Enemy Lines (2001), but they screwed up and put this one on instead.

Instead of laughs, I get Thomas Ian Griffith (xXx, Vampires) as an ex soldier going back to rescue his buddy, who was supposed to be dead, and some nuclear triggers. He is, in turn, rescued by a bunch of Marine misfits that lounge around on his boat in Tahiti.

No, it's not Rambo II, Braddock: Missing in Action III, Uncommon Valor, or any one of a hundred other B movies that have a similar theme. If you have seen any of those, you have seen this one.

Bad acting, useless dialogue, formulaic script and implausible action sequences. If you enjoyed Rambo II, this is the movie for you. The ONLY redeeming quality is that it gave work to Filipino actors (playing Vietnamese...not very convincingly). It's unfortunate how so many Americans are still so totally hung up on the fact that they lost the Vietnam war that they need to keep creating this kind of crap just so that they can feel better through some pitiful consolation of watching scores of Vietnamese soldiers getting shot, beaten and "vanquished" by a couple of Americans. Which is why even the action sequences were bad. This film is really a low point.