The mediocre raid

Know what's a good war movie? The Longest Day. Know what's not? The Great Raid.

Sometimes I review movies made in 2005. Deal with it.

Last night I was scrolling through the movies I've recorded in the past few months and noticed I hadn't watched it yet. It looked interesting. I like James Franco and I've heard lots of positive stuff about him as a person and an actor, and Connie Neilson is always fun to watch. And when you hear the war movie title The Great Raid it kind of sounds like The Great Escape and that was awesome. And the previews all made it look like this action packed midnight battle. So I watched it.

Let's ignore the ridiculous amount of voice over and get to the good stuff.

First, the raid itself doesn't take place until about an hour into the movie, and then only after about ten minutes of looking at some guys in a field waiting, and that only after watching James Franco spend five minutes explaining every detail of the plan so we'll be sure to understand it.

Only here's the thing about that. It took his character so long and so much detail to explain the plan that I tuned out, so by the time the plan went into action I had no idea what was going on. Kind of like anatomy class.

In fact, as I got closer to the actual raid I started fast forwarding. That's bad, when you fast forward through plot to get to the action. That means The Great Raid is kind of like action porn. But even the action wasn't that great.

But all that would be tolerable in a film that had better developed characters. I've always liked James Franco and was really annoyed to see him play this entire film like he was half asleep.

But then I realized it wasn't just him. It was everybody. It felt like the entire cast had been subjected to a craft services lunch of a bag of bagels and a cantaloupe and now they were bored and depressed.

They were all the same sad boring guy. Everybody. They read their lines the same sad way. They shuffled through scenes like they were just struggling to get to the end of their lines. Even their meaningful gazes to camera where a little nonchalant.

So since they didn't much care about their own story, I definitely didn't.

That's got to be the director, right? I mean when every single actor does a crap job it has to be the motivation supplied him by the boss.

He should have gone with a better catering firm.

But when you look at The Longest Day you can really tell the difference between the characters because not only do they have personality quirks, but the actors play each person as if he were real, full of backstory and everything. Because you can write up all those details about a person's history, but nobody will care unless the actor plays that history in his face.

Tomorrow, for a contrast, I think I'll talk about why my mom liked The Kingdom.