Originally published 8/16/2005
The Great Raid
Director: John Dahl
Writers: Carlo Bernard and Doug Miro, based on the books The Great Raid on Cabanatuan by William B. Breuer and Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides
Producers: Marty Katz, Lawrence Bender
Stars: Benjamin Bratt, James Franco, Joseph Fiennes, Connie Nielsen, Martin Csokas, Robert Mammone, Max Martini, Cesar Montano
I have lamented in the past about the relative dearth of “B”-movies in modern Hollywood – the movie business seems to believe it’s wasting everyone’s time if they don’t spend $100 Million. There are always the comedies, horror movies, and “prestige” pictures where no dime is spent when a penny could put something on screen in its place, but I’m talking about a different animal, one I admit is harder to define.
I do know a “B” movie when I see it, and in its best moments The Great Raid is a “B” movie: unpretentious, professional, devoted to its genre and willing to make creative use of limited resources. For comparison in the field of World War II movies – Patton is an “A” picture for the scope of its story, Saving Private Ryan is an “A” picture for the spectacle and artistic ambitions of its makers. The Great Raid finds more familiar company with overlooked eye-level fare like Battleground with Van Johnson. Although it’s not without unnecessary flab and flourish, at heart it tells a good story and does it with clarity and gutty simplicity.
We open with a history lesson about America’s lurching entrance into World War II after Pearl Harbor and the painful decision to deal with Hitler in Europe first. This essentially condemned tens of thousands of American and Filipino soldiers to Japanese capture and the legendary brutality of the Bataan Death March.
But three years later, Nazi power is fading and Allied forces are pushing forward in the Pacific as well. The Japanese would rather incinerate their prisoners than let them be freed, so any approach by American forces is potentially a death sentence for any POW’s who have managed to survive three years of starvation and torture (not to mention the feeling that they were abandoned by their countrymen).
The only thing to be done is launch a daring rescue attempt ahead of the main body of the army, and this movie dramatizes the raid on Cabanatuan prison. It makes for a corking story which has the advantage of being true in most of its best details. In a period of 5 days a group of Army Rangers with thorough training but little to no combat experience conceived and executed a jailbreak in the face of some rather incredible odds – what success their efforts met with I will lead you to discover on your own.
We pursue three story threads. The main thrust is the Rangers, with a decisive but distant commander in Lt. Col. Mucci (Benjamin Bratt). He entrusts Stanford ROTC grad Captain Prince (James Franco) to map out and lead the raid, probably because the bookish Prince is the only one who will dare argue with him.
Inside the camp, the prisoners, fighting malaria and digging graves for their friends, debate rumors of MacArthur’s advance and the wisdom of escape attempts in the face of their increasingly vicious guards. So weakened and used to punishment are they that when they wake up one day to find all of the Japanese leaving, they stay and wait for more to replace them rather than risk providing an excuse to be shot. Their ostensible leader is Major Gibson (Joseph Fiennes), who barely has the strength to stand but moons quietly over a woman on the outside.
She’s not so far away as other soldiers’ sweethearts; she is Margaret Utinsky (Connie Nielsen), a nurse working with the Filipino underground to smuggle medicine into the camps, constantly in fear of having her cell of friends discovered. She pines equally for Gibson, though they have never admitted their affections for each other.
This storyline feels the most false, and the simple explanation is that it is false – Major Gibson is a composite character and Utinsky’s real-life heroics were motivated by something deeper than not wanting to leave a good man behind. She takes no active role in the raid and thus seems less useful as anything but demographic bait as the movie progresses. Fiennes, very good in costume pieces like Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love, seems pointlessly miscast as a grimy G.I. here; he comes off less iron-willed than he does mopey.
The movie is most confident charting the progress of the raid. Bratt makes for a capable screen commander, giving us a glimpse into a quirky motivational style that is part paternal and part cult-of-personality. His troops creep through the wilderness in broad daylight, not even able to bring helmets because of the noise they make, knowing that at the end of this journey is a quiet crawl across 800 yards of open grass towards an armed encampment that has three times their numbers in soldiers plus a couple of tanks.
Director John Dahl, who has proudly made a career in “B” pictures with thrillers like Joy Ride and noir twisters like The Last Seduction, stages the raid with utmost confidence, letting you see geographically exactly what the soldiers intend to accomplish. The action is not as visceral or bloody as is the modern trend; it’s almost clinical, more focused on the general strategic sweep of the mission. But Dahl finds time for little clips of brilliance like showing how painfully long 200 yards is when it’s the main road of a prison camp and you have to run to the other end with a bazooka. Also a moment where a soldier tosses a grenade to take out a bunker, gets shot, and goes back to toss another grenade.
To its credit the movie also spotlights the essential role played by Filipino guerillas, who had previously considered the difficulties of moving 500 sick and wounded men to safety, and could be used cleverly to fend off Japanese reinforcements because the Japanese always attack Filipinos straight on – “they don’t respect us enough as soldiers” to use flanking maneuvers, says guerilla leader Pajota (Cesar Montano).
That quality straight-ahead storytelling like this gets lumped with the awkward love story shows a clash of intentions. Utinsky’s activities point towards a larger tapestry about the Philippines and its crucial role in the Pacific Theatre not only militarily, but in the actions of its people. But The Great Raid has not been made with the resources of such an epic, which leads to poorly-scripted patch job scenes trying to exposit the bigger picture for us. Rebels fear a final killing sweep by the Japanese – “we have evidence of their war crimes!” someone declares for the audience’s benefit. Then there is the scene where two soldiers brought to town to load food for the camp discuss the history of Gibson’s affections for Margaret. That the younger soldier could be a prisoner for three years and not have gotten wind of this until now is unlikely, that he uses his energy to get all the soap opera details instead of saving it to load sacks is what truly makes the scene clang.
An “A” movie would have had the space to set up this romance without resorting to such clumsy shortcuts. A “B” movie wouldn’t have wasted time on it at all. In the final analysis The Great Raid’s flaws are most obvious when it is trapped between the two; its virtues most apparent when it embraces its natural shape.