Just when you thought there were no more World War II stories to tell on screen, along comes “The Great Raid,” a gripping tale based on a stirring mission of heroism.
| Gripping: A grim account of the January 1945 mission to liberate 500 Allied POWs from a Japanese camp in the Philippines. Director John Dahl keeps it lean and old-fashioned, and the cast is strong.
Rated: R rating is for violence, language. Now showing: tk |
The film details the plan to liberate 500 Allied prisoners from a Japanese POW camp at Cabanatuan, in the Philippines, in January 1945. It’s a partly fictionalized story based on the nonfiction books “The Great Raid on Cabanatuan,” by William Breuer, and “Ghost Soldiers,” by Hampton Sides.
Leading up to the raid itself, the film adroitly follows three different threads. One is the hurried planning of the raid itself, a plan drawn up by an Army captain, Robert Prince (played by James Franco, from the “Spiderman” movies), under the supervision of the bold and somewhat eccentric Lt. Col. Henry Mucci (Benjamin Bratt).
It’s hurried because the Japanese are known to have brutally slaughtered other Allied POWs as they withdraw their troops from the Philippines. This means that the raiders, about 120 Rangers and Alamo Scouts, will have to sneak through Japanese lines before the camp is actually abandoned – when it would be too late.
In the camp, a major (a gutsy Joseph Fiennes) wastes away from malaria and pines for a woman in Manila. His gruff friendship with a captain (the excellent Marton Csokas) is the stuff of an old-school war movie, the kind of masculine bond that director Howard Hawks portrayed in 1940s pictures.
And we visit Manila (in scenes actually shot in Shanghai), where the woman being pined for (Connie Nielsen), an American nurse working with the Filipino underground, struggles to get aid to the prisoners.
The movie does a good job of acknowledging the Filipino resistance, and gets a strong performance out of Cesar Montano (a star in his country’s cinema) as a rebel captain. He dryly notes that his strategies are based on how little respect the Japanese soldiers have for his fighters.
Director John Dahl, previously known for his modern noir pictures “Red Rock West” and “The Last Seduction,” brings his lean style to bear on this material. He lets the audience see what the plan is, and then he follows it out – sounds simple, but surprisingly few action movies do that these days. The movie’s bleached look (shot mostly in Australia) fits the mood of the piece, which is hard and heavy.
I suppose it’s possible that some of this is corny, but after a certain point I didn’t care. If you like this kind of thing, you’ll be locked into the progress of the mission within the first 15 minutes.
Although its title echoes “The Great Escape,” this movie doesn’t have that wartime classic’s spirit of bright adventure; it’s grim and steady. The atrocities committed by the Japanese, against POWs and occupied people, are not skimped.
“The Great Raid” tells a riveting story, and it honors the people involved. And some actual newsreel footage of the participants makes this one end-credits crawl you won’t walk out on.
Benjamin Bratt (left) and James Franco star in “The Great Raid.”
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