The Great Raid
First of all, I was supposed to receive the widescreen director's cut of this film, but in a rare Netflix foul-up I got the full-screen version instead. In the interest of keeping my queue moving, I went ahead and watched it; and it wasn't nearly as miserable as I thought it would be. The Great Raid is fairly standard WWII movie fare, with the buffer of real historical footage from before and after the film's events to add some appropriate gravitas to this plot to rescue 500 U.S. POWs who had been through hell in the previous three years and were facing extermination at the hands of their Japanese captors as American forces approached. The military planning and preparation of the raid is very by-the-book and actually a little boring thanks to completely one-dimensional, lifeless performances from Franco (as the captain in charge of the raid) and Bratt (as the Lt. Colonel in command of the whole battalion). The better part of the movie is actually in the subplots, which shouldn't work but do thanks to more drawn out characters. Especially good is the tragic love story between an American nurse working with the Filipino resistance in Manila (Nielsen) to smuggle medicine into the camp and the commanding U.S. officer in the camp (Fiennes), who failed to express their true feelings for each other before the war started because she was married. Fiennes' character also has a testy friendship with his second in command (Csokas), who struggles to quell his urge to tempt fate and escape the camp. The excellent recreation of the raid and most of the story were interesting enough to distract me from the fact that Netflix had sent me the worst possible version of the movie.
- July 3, 2007
DVD Details/Extras
The full screen version contained no special features.