By EWAN McDONALD
(Herald rating: * * * )
Again, Mel Gibson goes into battle as the reluctant soldier who must do God's noble work and protect his way of life from foreign devils. You could call it The Patriot II. Or Braveheart: The Vietnam Years.
The Battle of Ia Drang in
1965 was the American military's first major firefight in Vietnam. Gibson plays Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore, who leads the first battalion of the Seventh Cavalry. The Washington brass has sent him to tackle an enemy which has more troops but not such good technology.
Gibson is not quite alone in his plight, however. He has the support of as many Hollywood names as the budget could run to, including Chris Klein and Greg Kinnear as his subordinates and Madeline Stowe as his adoring wife.
There are not quite enough special battlefield effects to make this Saving Private Ryan Again, but director-screenwriter Randall Wallace is not Spielberg, nor does he have access to his merchant bankers. Off-screen, Gibson had Moore as his major adviser, which accounts for the reverential tone of what's on screen.
As others have noted, this is the second major Hollywood movie since September 11 to present an American battlefield reverse as a victory. It is about the triumph of "getting all our boys out". And as transatlantic reviewers have pointed out, it conveniently omits the most famous veteran of Ia Drang, the British-born platoon leader Rick Rescorla, later a 62-year-old executive at the World Trade Centre who died masterminding an evacuation that saved thousands of lives.
That Cornish accent was just too hard for a good ol' boy to get his tongue around, huh?
¥ DVD features: movie (138min); commentary by Wallace; Making Of ... feature; deleted scenes with commentary.
