Resgate no Vietnã

It's 1972 Vietnam. A small group of United States Marines is sent on a mission behind enemy lines to rescue POWs. They come under fire even before their chopper lands and they end up stranded without help. The group is mostly black as each member flashbacks to their lives in America and their origin stories.

Black filmmaker Preston A. Whitmore II is struggling with a lower budget production and it looks like it. It's no better than a TV movie with ambitions. It tries with some action. The subject matter tries to be edgy. That's the best compliment I can give it. Everybody is trying. It's still not good enough.

This is an okay movie if you have an hour and a half to spare. If you like witty humor and rejoinders, then this is the movie for you. Eddie Griffin is hilarious in this movie. He has some of the best quips given to a black man in a movie. Maybe it's just me but I love funny remarks and cool characters. Eddie Girffin plays one of the coolest black characters on film in this movie. He should be given a spin off of this role. Maybe he was just playing himself. If you want to base this movie on race then if your Caucasian you might not take much affinity to it since it deals particularly with blacks and black issues. But if you just don't care and like to see people get their heads blown off and simple storytelling with cool quotes then you will love it!

Give me a break. The Vietnam war was a real war where real people died. Total U.S. fatalities in the theater were over 55,000, if I recall correctly. And as wars go, this one was not managed very well, in my opinion, but this movie is disgraceful in its blatantly dishonest portrayal of the war. All of the characters are basically comic book characters. All of the behaviors displayed by all of the characters are behaviors that would never have been exhibited by anyone who actually found themselves in a war zone. The movie implicitly wants to be taken seriously, but you cannot take it seriously. The white officer leading the platoon is especially a comic book character. His enlisted men show him a level of disrespect that is so far over the top, and so far beyond what any officer in the U.S.M.C would ever tolerate of his marines, that the movie becomes a comic book within just a few minutes. And it is a bad, bad, comic book. In reality, a marine officer will put his life on the line for his marines at the drop of a hat, and his non-commissioned officers will do the same for him. No non-commissioned officer in the marines would ever speak to his superior officer in the way that these jackasses do. Anyone that did would find himself doing hard time. In the U.S.M.C., discipline is everything. Discipline is the life blood of the Marine Corps. This movie isn't just unrealistic, it is disgraceful. The people who made it are shameless, and have no knowledge of the Marine Corps.

Okay..... if Platoon or Apocolypse Now is available, you should rent those films instead. However, if you've seen those features (and enjoyed them) -- then give The Walking Dead a shot. Its nothing extraordinary, but each actor (especially Allan Payne) gives a excellent, believable performance. Its also nice to see that Central Florida was used as a location to film something besides a bad comedy (Earnest Saves Christmas) or bad Reality TV shows (Making The Band).

(1994) The Walking Dead WAR

Not to be confused with the TV series that started in 2010 which involves zombies, this is strictly a 'war' movie made in 1994 from HBO written and directed by Preston A. Whitmore which focuses on five marines being stranded somewhere along the Vietnam jungle, using the saving mission operation as a backdrop to tell viewers how these specific five became marines in the first place. It includes a preacher, a thug, and a young man who was living in his mom's basement. Not one war story had anything to do with pride. I mean, what are the odds that all five of them had an "ulterior motive" for joining. The other thing I had a problem with, is that there are times, the fighting war scenes didn't look like how actual war scenes was supposed to look like, since it looked fake and stagey, and despite the good ending, it doesn't offer anything new viewers can't come up with themselves.