Hey folks, Harry here... Seems that John Dahl recently had a test screening of THE GREAT RAID, and frankly... it didn't do so well. Still a lot of time before this film is supposed to hit our collective eyes on February 13th, 2004. That's right, John has 7 months to tighten and toy with his film, which at this stage is probably little more than an assembly print, meaning that John and his editor put all the scenes together, had a very loose temp track and that they were simply showing the film to an audience to begin to see how far they need to go to get the film into shape. Are the problems these 3 having with the film, the sort that can be handled in that time... 7 months... that's a long time to fix a lot of issues, let's keep our eyes on this one, I'm not gonna give up on a filmmaker of Dahl's skill!!!

Hey Harry. Ford here. Just went last night to the Pacific Sherman Oaks Galleria to catch a screening of 'The Great Raid', the new film by John Dahl.

Now to start with, I've been a big John Dahl fan. I really enjoyed Red Rock West, Rounders, The Last Seduction. JoyRide had its problems, but for the most part, from inside knowledge, I blame that film on its producers. But he has always seemed to be a fun director. So how is his action war film? Especially since it is the same story that Spielberg wanted to do with Cruise in their film Ghost Soldiers (by the way, is that project dead, because I haven't heard anything about it in over a year, and it is the EXACT same story as this).

To sum it up easily, this film doesn't work entirely for plenty of reasons. Let's start with casting. Benjamin Bratt plays the lead Col. Mucci, and he is like a piece of furniture through the whole film. Just horrible. Has anyone other than Julia Roberts ever really liked this guy? I mean, other than his cool little cameo in Traffic?? He is HORRIBLE. His big dramatic breakthrough scene - "You know what...I think I am going to shave off my moustache." Then his second in command is James Franco, who really worked in Spiderman, but postures in this like he's James Dean the sequel. But he's DONE that movie. Then there's Joseph Fiennes, and he's suffering from malaria in the prison camp, and he'll do scenes where he's walking around just fine, and then ten seconds later, sweating on a bed like Whitney Houston from his malaria, which is just killing him. His performance is just all over the place. And you seriously get bored of him doing the "I have malaria" stare.

Now let's hit the story. Okay, the U.S. screwed over some troops in the Phillipines. MacArthur ran off to Australia, and we left behind 10,000 troops in Bataan. They got captured. They had to do a death march for 60 miles where a ton of 'em died, and now there's like 500 left. We send in Law and Order's Army Rangers (I'd rather have watched Bill Murray's squad from Stripes) to go raid the prison camp, now THAT would have been a hit movie. But we hardly get an idea of anything about the soldiers, except for the bold brace decision of Benjamin Bratt to shave off the moustache before going to war. We keep jumping back to the really boring dying soldiers in the prison camp. Why can't Dahl watch more entertaining 'Let's get 'em out' movies, like Uncommon Valor, or Missing In Action?? Instead, he went with the boring Missing In Action 2 idea of 'Let's show the miserable guys in the camp' for most of the movie. No. NOOOOO!!!! You show me 500 troops that can hardly walk because they have been starved and without medical attention, you show me like a billion Japanese troops, and then you show me Law and Order and James Dean, and I'm thinking that we are in a lot of trouble. And similar to Bratt's shaving of the moustache, we have several scenes where Franco stares at his foot, which has like a corn on it or something, and then after three or four of these 'stare at the foot' scenes, finally one has a doctor who tells him that "he can't believe he's walking on it". What??? These are the tough guys. One is about to get a no go because of a rash on his foot. Where the fuck is Rambo when we need him. Someone call Bruce or Sly or Arnold and now, because I have James Dean with a sore foot going to battle. You need that tough guy scene, with the bad ass with no expression, checking out his knife like Rambo or The Minnesota Governor in Predator, chewing tobacco, and looking ugly, and ready to go really mess up the bad guy. I get 130 pound guys with a skinned foot, and Law and Order guy.

Then we have the other subplot, the one with the..well, she not the girlfriend or the wife of Joseph Fiennes, but she's in love with him, even though she used to have a husband. Oh, she also runs the underground world that sneaks medical supplies to the troops in the prison. She walks around with more makeup than the chick on Drew Carey, and somehow BLENDS into the crowd with the poor migrant Phillipinos. Then all of her underground friends get systematically shot and killed by the Japs. No questioning. No identifying. Just walk up, pull them out of a crowd, and BAM. But when they catch the only white woman in the country, they put her in a cell. She even has perfect lipstick during a torture sequence. Retarded.

So then the raid happens. Lasts about 20 minutes, and is a lot of fun. Nothing you hadn't seen before, but in a theater with great sound, scenes like that are great. Kind of like when my roommate Brad just bought a great sound system for the house, and right when we hooked it up to the big tv, we could have watched Schindler's List, or Citizen Kane, or some moving piece of cinema with the 25 channels of sound.

BRING ON THE FUCKING MATRIX!!!! And you don't watch the movie. You put on the chapter on the DVD with the gunfight in the office building where they just blow the shit out of everything. And you turn it up real loud. And your big fat neighbor with the moustache comes complaining, and that's when you throw on the last 20 minutes of Die Hard, and start screaming 'Yippee Kay Yay', and then you throw on the final gunfight in 'Way of the Gun', and then you and your roommates just go grab a bunch of shotguns and start...well, you know.

Anyway, it's kind of like that. Bazookas and stuff being shot all over the place, plenty of people getting killed. And then there's the one scene where there's the guy who you want to kill the entire movie, kind of like Robert Patrick in Copland, and you're just begging for someone to kill him, and there isn't a gunfight, it's a real fight, because that's how real men do it, like when Bruce Willis fought the guy that played Meat in Porky's in Die Hard 2 and stabbed him in the eye with an icicle, and so he finally does kill him, and you cheer, and then they plug his corpse with a few more bullets for extra effort, and you cheer some more. Good times.

SPOLIER ALERT

So Fiennes is holding out for his hot chick, and she apparently hasn't been digging on anyone in the Phillipino Underground (or so they would have us think, if you get what I'm saying, and I think you do.....Four years in the underground, and no one ever got a little drunk one night and, well , you know...I mean, they are smuggling PAINKILLERS) , and then she shows up after the raid, which is a great scene because it looks like she just pulled her car up after the party. HOW IN THE HELL DID SHE FIND THEM IN THE MIDDLE OF THE JUNGLE. SHE WAS IN THE CITY EARLIER. Looked like a scene out of Sixteen Candles, like the car pulls up after the big party, and the hot chick comes looking for the guy or something. Except the twist is that Joseph Fiennes has finally died of malaria. So she reads the note he wrote for her, and she is all torn up, and then seeks solace in a hug from Fiennes friend in the prison camp, and ...hmmm...maybe this story's just heating up.

Remember that great scene in Red Rock West, when Nick Cage goes out to the car, and looks like he's finally going to get away, and he starts the car, and the gas is on empty, and he looks at it with despair and mumbles "Story of my fucking life", and it's just great. Yeah, well, there aren't any scenes like that in this film.

Hundreds of dead bodies. Zero breasts (and that is a crime in this flick). Assassination by gunshot to the back of the head. Malaria Fu. Bazooka Fu. Booty Time Nominations for Jourdan Lee Khoo as the evil Japanese commander for lines like "This man disobeyed me. Now ten men will pay for that mistake." Foot rash Fu. Pharmacy Fu. Pills Smuggled in the Bra Fu. Death by dousing of gasoline and then being on the wrong end of a torch. Fire Fu. Booty Time Nominations for Joseph Fiennes with "These bastards are starving us on purpose", and "I really don't think it's malaria this time." Gratuitous General MacArthur footage. Gratuitous moustache. Gratuitous 'Shaving the Moustache' scene. Razor Fu.

Where is Ghost Soldiers??? Why didn't they make that one??

Out.

Then here's "The Brief One" with his concise dismissive of Dahl's latest...