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| Battle for Haditha (Cert. 15) |
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| 31/03/2008 |
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 In the good ol' days of cinema (circa 1985), watching Americans shoot foreigners was a comforting, cathartic experience. It was easy to sleep at night knowing that well-trained, muscle-bound men were available to drop behind enemy lines and murder those stinking Communists. Sadly things have changed.
Today, rather than relying on former bodybuilders with bizarre accents, the US military employs entire platoons of slack-jawed morons who rely on the rule that if you wear something that looks like a towel on your head, you were probably personally responsible for 9/11 and should be shot immediately before you do it again. In their hands, the 'shoot-first, ask-questions-later' routine just doesn't seem quite so amusing.
Such is the lesson from documentary legend Nick Broomfield (Biggie and Tupac, Kurt and Courtney, The Leader, The Driver, and the Driver's Wife) in his second foray into drama and acting. It tells the harrowing true story of a unit of Marines who slaughtered 29 Iraqi civilians in the wake of a roadside bomb on one of their jeeps in 2005. It's a finely detailed account that can't quite move beyond Broomfield's documentary instincts.
The big mistake was using real marines as actors - which makes precisely as much sense as sending actors to carry out counter-terrorism operations in Afghanistan - but the slightly embarrassing first hour of amateur dramatics does at least leave you unprepared for the shockingly realistic, stomach-churning violence of the main event, presenting at least one version of the reality behind the headlines.
The question is whether anyone really needs to be told that the American military is populated by trigger-happy, gung-ho dickheads, and run by even worse. Words: Eric Randolph
BATTLE FOR HADITHA - Cert. 15 - Available now on DVD! |