Saving Private Burnett. Review on Behind Enemy Lines

Throughout Behind Enemy Lines I couldn’t help but feel that the entire premise was nothing but cheap and manipulative drivel that features an awful video game-like story and overblown visuals. For you gamers out there, the story (as well as the setting) was like something out of the Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six games. In fact, the entire film is like one big screen video game adaptation. You start the game up, your character is Chris Burnett and your mission is to escape from the evil Serbian forces that are on your tail. After every level, a quick movie pops up to tell what the current rescue situation is and that your commanding officer will be there for you at the very end of the last level, after you kill the main villain (an Indian tracker-like sniper), of course.

Cheap thrills, obvious dramatic moments, and typical action sequences are in great abundance in Behind Enemy Lines, which is, of course, exactly what you may be looking for. Intense and tight action scenes are the moments it should be striving for, with a realistic story and plausible action. However, Behind Enemy Lines’ main purpose is to thrill and make you feel patriotic (if you really want to be patriotic make the villain Osama Bin Laden and the setting Afghanistan). But it does neither and in the process, makes you feel cheated and embarrassed (not only for yourself, but also for Gene Hackman and Owen Wilson).

In these times of cynical, intelligent and sarcastic writing, how could the writers (which includes four, by the way) be so ignorant as to make such a lame and labored movie? Could they not see how powerfully weak, contrived and idiotic the writing was? The visuals were fair at times but the writing was absolutely atrocious. And as I left the theater, groaning and cringing, my most certainly reasonable judgements about the film were actually challenged and opposed by my company (they had enjoyed it immensely). Well, I hope critics are not that divided from the general movie-going public or else our taste is undoubtedly steering you towards the wrong films. Because Behind Enemy Lines is, let me assure you, not one of the best films of the year.

Our hero is obviously Lt. Chris Burnett, of the United States Navy, and a fighter plane navigator. Behind Enemy Lines then begins with Top Gun-like action; a plane is set to take off, but we find it is only a routine and the pilots hop out, grumbling with sarcasm. Burnett then hangs out with his pilot named Lt. Michael Stackhouse (Gabriel Macht) and Burnett’s smart aleck attitude begins to annoy his commanding officer, Leslie Reigart (Gene Hackman). We then learn the Navy will, unfortunately, be losing this hardworking officer as Burnett wants out, badly.

Then on Christmas day Burnett and Stackhouse go on a routine reconnaissance flight mission, when they spot some unnatural activity on the radar in the southern forest of Bosnia. They go check it out but suddenly find themselves on the run from two missiles fired from a radical Serbian army, which is commanded by a Slobodan Milosevic-like maniac general named Lokar (Olek Krupa). While their plane is blown to smithereens the two are able to escape, however, only to find themselves dead (Stackhouse) and hunted (Burnett) by the evil rebel army, in the war torn Bosnia. Reigart then must make quick decisions as how to rescue Burnett, without upsetting the commanding officers.

Behind Enemy Lines is another espionage adventure movie with even worse dialogue, even worse situations, and an even worse story. It’s the first day out in the world after training day at the Hollywood film school for overpaid hacks and director John Moore passes with flying colors. He successfully blends music video style and jittery, sped-up cinematography into one bomb of a movie (and by ‘successfully’ I mean the movie will make a lot of money).

Music video style editing and it’s bombastic but vibrant cinematography is becoming increasingly important to today’s short attention-spanned audiences, and the studios are indeed more than happy to fulfill this need, as they started it in the first place (it saves time on creativity). Behind Enemy Lines is so bloated and obsessed with its visual style that it becomes obvious the movie is a typical case of style over substance. An exercise in the absurdly lame patriotic action movie genre with little original story material at all. It’s nothing more than a cliched adventure film without the fun adventure, instead it substitutes the fun with an in-your-face visual spectacular, which is unfortunately too obvious.

The director John Moore, is a newbie hack who is graced with the creative skill of copying other directors such as Darren Aronofsky, Steven Spielberg, and even Tony Scott. He throws in some Aronofsky-like ultra quick editing and a bit of Aronofsky’s trademark ‘snorri-cam’. Then a Tony Scott-like espionage plot is tossed in with little care or polishing and we have ourselves an old fashioned action movie that should have never been produced in the first place. The movie then attempts to pay some kind of pathetic homage to Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan with battle scenes clearly echoing the WW2 epic’s greatest war sequences. Actually, they probably used the same background battle sound effects as Saving Private Ryan in a cheap attempt to either pay more unnecessary homage or to save money. Anyway, I’m sure you’ll think it all looks cool. Particularly the, like, totally excellent part when that guy pops out of the snow with his gun’s blazing in a heated fury against his seemingly unstoppable pursuer (just a sample of your company’s reaction’s after viewing the film, or something to that effect). Utter brainless bliss, I suppose, just the type of good feeling the movie wants to fill you up with, entirely devoid of any true human emotions or actual drama.

Okay, so I’ll admit I enjoyed some of the action scenes and cinematography, which was gritty with a nice stark atmosphere, something not too common among mainstream films like this. Owen Wilson is occasionally fun and the hardest working man in Hollywood, Gene Hackman, is good but insincere and has long ago worn out this type of character and material (his constant repeating of “America wants their pilot back!” gets a bit annoying). The rest of the performances are cliched, tired, and redundant (particularly Joaquim de Almeida, of Desperado, as a wheezy, counterpart Admiral). And obviously the nasty Eastern Euro-trash villains are seriously underdeveloped and nothing more than devices for the cliché-ridden screenplay. But good storytelling was long abandoned by Behind Enemy Lines; it is simply dull and brainless in that department… as well as in many others. The dialogue is banal and mind numbingly uninteresting, while the visuals boast of awesome (but overused) power. Behind Enemy Lines might be worth a look if your feeling ludicrously patriotic or if you don’t mind having your senses and logic occasionally insulted.