Watching a crappy war flick= 8 dollars. Staying at home and feeding your goldfish= priceless. This film is the perfect war flick with some good old propaganda served up just in time for the Christmas season. John Moore’s directorial debut is a film that simply annoyed me. Fashioned a la Top Gun, this film offers up a good dose of some video-game like style of montage shots (actually Moore has done some Sega commercials) and see-what-I-can-do noisy explosions with a Saving Private Ryan jumpy-camera-movement batch of visuals. Behind Enemy Lines is one of those films that sacrifices plot for big-annoying explosions. Therefore, I tend to look for other things as soon as the “stupid movie flags” are raised. The immeasurable stupidity begins from the very start when this whiney pilot who never gets to play with his big toy- gets shot down and must not only survive the elements but also find the strength to outthink and outrun the enemy. The fun begins once the two idiots decide to break the rules-leading them to press the eject button- one guy lands in the trees and the other lands in an open field (think the hills from The Sound of Music). So navigator Chris Burnett played by Owen Wilson (There’s Something about Mary) slams into the trees should be in pretty bad shape right? Nope, it’s the other guy who ends up having to wait for the ambulances to come and pick him up. Unfortunately for both of them, there are a bunch of really mean people who will probably want to take out their frustrations on the fallen birds. Our hero the brave pilot likes making himself as visible as possible by running up and down the mountainside in complete daylight playing this now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t game with his pursuers. Admiral Reigart- Gene Hackman (Heist) stays on the big boat keeping score his soldier’s fate and is there to remind him that he is a sissy. Meanwhile, the hero spends the entire film evading a rainstorm of gunfire, breaching the cold weather, staying dry and warm in cold temperature, surviving on no food, skipping trip wires like a football wide receiver, avoiding an entire army, making fun of a psycho sharp-shooter who has the toughest time at aiming such an easy target and suffers only from chapped lips, the usual array of cuts on the face and the bullet off the shoulder. Oh…and he also finds the strength to become a trapeze artist swinging about under a helicopter as bullets fly by from every which way in an absurd grand finale. There is a lot of those why did he or didn’t he do this type moments that drives me a little nuts. Basically, Behind Enemey Lines’ entire plot is ridiculous.
John Moore tries hard to drum up the dramatic cues with a change in the score to intensify political matters or utilize a dialogue that asks for plenty of screaming- too bad- Hackman looks good in a suit, but his barking in these heated-military-debates seems plainly, un-genuine. The treatment of the subject matter is a narrow-minded one-dimensional political view in which Moore seems to throw a couple of headline words simply to place the viewer within some historical context but more likely to remind the viewer that the war is not on the ski slopes of Vail, Colorado. With a believability factor of zero and the action seeming more farcical than authenti; you’ll get very little for your money. Skip this one.
