Behind Enemy Lines

"Behind Enemy Lines" was completed only a few months ago, but its attitude towards the U.S. military already feels antiquated considering the war we're in. Fortunately, its action scenes are cool enough that you may not care.

Irresponsibility, whether truculent or righteous, drives the pivotal actions taken by this film's main characters, Navy Lieutenant Chris Burnett (Owen Wilson) and Admiral Leslie Reigart (Gene Hackman). While on a routine Christmas Day surveillance mission, just four days before NATO troops are scheduled to pull out under a recently-negotiated peace agreement, restless navigator Burnett urges his pilot to veer off course and check out some suspicious movement in a Bosnian demilitarized zone. This action, of course, puts the peace agreement in jeopardy.

More to the point, it puts Burnett in jeopardy; his plane is shot down by some men in uniforms - which uniforms, no one knows - and the men find his pilot, immobilized by a broken leg, and execute him. Burnett runs, not immediately knowing why so many men are firing so many bullets at him.

It turns out that Burnett's plane photographed a dark secret that would jeopardize the peace agreement for excellent reasons. However, Reigart doesn't know that. He moves to extract Burnett anyway, because he's incensed that the French NATO commander (you can tell a character in an American war movie is supposed to be hated when he's French) keeps telling him that an extraction would make the prospects for peace even more unlikely. Well, of course it would, but Reigart's not about to let that stop him when his man is....behind enemy lines.

I hope we no longer celebrate such recklessness. In days of old, we wanted our knights to be bold, but now we should want them to be working within a strict framework of international justice, regardless of how many dark secrets they can accidentally discover by sudden impulsive freelancing.

Nevertheless, such sudden impulsive freelancing has often provided the basic materials for kick-ass action films, and the action in this film comes pretty darn close to kick-ass. It helps that the script, by David Veloz and Zak Penn, doesn't ask Owen Wilson to mow down acres upon acres of Slav barbarians with his trust 9mm, because we would laugh his soft body and unathletic movements off the screen. Burnett, instead, is a laid-back smartass who is nevertheless dedicated to his work, and this is Wilson's home territory. We sympathize with Burnett's occasional failures of nerve, and we believe his modest moral growth spurt late in the film, because Wilson never oversells either. He's a fine actor, and this is a distinguished performance.

Hackman, of course, can bark his lines with the rest of them, and it's always fun to watch him stand tall and give orders. However, Reigart is presented, unusually, as a fallible character, and Hackman never quite does justice to this. If we thought Reigart truly saw himself as imperfect, the film's other vague hints at moral ambiguity might have coalesced into something truly, electrically uncertain, taking this film to a place action films rarely go.

First-time director John Moore, on the other hand, takes "Behind Enemy Lines" where almost every successful action film of the last five years has been. His camera moves like a rabbit on speed even (especially!) when nothing special is happening, just like Michael Bay's. His shots of satellites and his pivoting-helicopter-shot fetish immediately recall Tony Scott's "Enemy of the State." And, like all modern-day war movie directors, he steals wholesale from Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan."

Moore's saving grace is that he's so damn good at his pilfering. The scene in which Burnett's plane desperately struggles to dodge two Bosnian surface-to-air missiles glitters with tension, as Moore draws out the encounter to nearly unbearable lengths. His unorthodox methods occasionally pay big-time dividends, as when he shows a minefield bristling with impassable danger by watching from the eyes of someone trying to pick out a clear path. And he knows how to use silence to emphasize sound, and space to emphasize closeness - two weapons often missing from the arsenals of novice action directors. True, Moore often overdirects - why do we need to see a stop-action shot of ice-cold, track-suited assassin Sasha (Russian director Vladimir Maskov) cocking his rifle, when full speed would be even more menacing? - but when he gets it right, you'll be on the edge of your seat.

There will be no action films that navigate the post-Sept. 11 landscape with intelligence and style for a while; it will take a while to think about how to do that, and then it will take a lot longer to actually make a film. What we'll be getting for the next few months are relics like "Behind Enemy Lines," films that have to overcome that weird out-of-place feeling with solid entertainment. Let's hope all of them deliver entertainment as solid as "Behind Enemy Lines" does.

WHY I WAS DISAPPOINTED WITH THIS REVIEW

1. I didn't mention that, as Michael Sapoznikow put it approximately, the reason the story feels vaguely familiar is that Scott O'Grady was downed over Bosnia in 1996 and spend 19 days drinking rainwater off leaves before being recovered by military helicopter.
2. I forgot to mention that Moore steals lots and lots of things from David O. Russell's "Three Kings," mostly because I couldn't remember that David O. Russell directed "Three Kings," or even that "Three Kings" was the movie Moore had stolen a bunch of stuff from. (See below for why.)
3. The review doesn't flow. I have come a long way since I used to just write my reviews as introductory paragraph-good stuff-bad stuff-closing paragraph, and there is a reason I came that long way: it reads better to have the material develop organically out of itself. This one bumbles along like a drunk on a Metro platform in comparison to my better reviews. The Gene Hackman ambiguity thing could be way better integrated into the larger structure of the review than it is.
4. I do not use the language as imaginatively as I normally like to. My somewhat lukewarm opinion of the film contributed to this, but normally I get at least one or two phrases in there that I really like. Here there's nothing I enjoy very much when reading over it.
5. The review is 20 words over my self-imposed upper limit. And arbitrary self-imposed limits are the best kind of limits.

The reason this review sucks is because I wrote it while dead tired and fighting a wicked headache and contending with a deadline twelve hours away, eight of which I needed for sleep (and six of which I ended up using for sleep, to the next day's detriment). So I have an excuse. But that doesn't make me happy with it. I apologize if you were disappointed. I'll go try to fight my current wicked headache and review "Ocean's Eleven" now.

A friend of mine said he felt that the disclosures above were "craven" and implied that they were embarrassing, so I feel the need now to explain why I put them in the original e-mail. It wasn't because I was particularly embarrassed or wanted sympathy. It was because I was frustrated, and I knew I wouldn't be able to do anything better with it on deadline. I was blowing off steam. The fact that I knew what was wrong with my review, I think, indicates that I knew what I should have done, and thus the list does not indict my skill but the mental blockages and shortage of time that were preventing me from deploying that skill.

Writing, especially this kind of writing, does have a production aspect about it. Most of the time, you can perform quality control pretty well, but sometimes the deadline is there and what you have sucks and you still have to send it in because it's better than nothing.

Finally, I could have fixed these flaws in my present leisure time, but the film's not really good enough to warrant a major time expenditure at this late date. And I was pretty happy with my review of "Ocean's Eleven."

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