Hart’s War
A Work of Studied Mediocrity
I never tell people not to see a movie.
Well, hardly ever. I think I told people to go to the library instead of seeing Pleasantville. I think I suggested that all remaining Swordfish DVDs should be crushed under a convenient steamroller. However, most of the time, I try to stop short of saying that people should not see any given movie. Thankfully, there aren’t that many movies that are so bad that they won’t appeal to someone, sometime. (There are a few such movies, and an alarming number of them feature Bruce Willis.)
Hart’s War is not a bad movie, on the order of North or Hudson Hawk or anything like that. Its snowy vision of the battlefields of the Ardennes and the prison camps of central Europe is precise. The acting, mostly by Willis and newcomer Colin Farrell, is solid if unspectacular. The story manages to hang together for most of the movie, which is about as good of an average as you get nowadays. However, none of this matters. As a result, I am going to do something I (almost) never do.
Do not see this movie.
My basic objection to Hart’s War is a simple one, and a near-universal one. It is not as good as the book. John Katzenbach wrote the book, a competent murder mystery and legal thriller based in a World War II prisoner of war camp. The twist was that the accused was a Tuskegee Airman, an African-American pilot shot down while protecting a bomber crew. The resulting book was somewhere between Stalag 17 and To Kill A Mockingbird. The book itself was just average, but anyone could see that it had the makings of an exceptional movie. Everyone, that is, but screenwriters Billy Ray (”Earth 2″) and Terry George (In The Name of the Father, if you can believe it).
Of course, saying that “the book was better” doesn’t in and of itself amount to movie criticism; you can say that about just about any book that ever got turned into a movie. (There are exceptions. Die Hard, for one, was better than the airport novel that inspired it, and there’s that pesky Bruce Willis again.) Saying that “the book was better” generally just means that you’ve read the book; it does nothing to help the frustrated moviegoer figure out what to go see on Friday night. And spending a lot of time explaining just how the book is different is a pointless, academic exercise. Pointing out that the Tommy Hart (Farrell) character was a poor-but-proud Harvard Law student in the book but a born-to-privilege Yale Law student in the movie doesn’t do anything for anybody.
However, the problem with the movie is not that it doesn’t follow the book more closely but that it wastes our time. The initial incident that sparks the events of both the movie and the book is the arrival of the Tuskegee Airman (Airmen, in the movie) into the all-white world of the prisoner-of-war camp. In the book, this happens in the third chapter or so. In the movie, it doesn’t happen until almost an hour in. Instead of kicking off the intrigue and suspense and mystery of the whole thing, Hart’s War, like the St. Louis Rams in the Super Bowl, waits until after halftime to get started.
The first part of the movie just screws around with extraneous plot twists. There’s a long scene showing how Hart was captured in the first place that exists mostly to show bloodshed and mayhem. There’s entirely too much time spent on the essentially unimportant details of Hart’s interrogation, and another long scene is spent showing the strafing of a German railroad station for the sake of shoehorning some explosives into the story.
It’s not so much that the movie has too many explosions as it is that there isn’t enough time spent on the potentially explosive relationships between the prisoners. The character of Lincoln Scott, the African-American prisoner accused of murdering an abusive racist fellow prisoner, is curiously circumscribed in the movie. In the book, Scott is touchy, angry, and bitter at his treatment. In the movie, he is played by Terrence Dashon Howard as being noble and resigned and courageous in a way that is admirable but doesn’t set off any sparks. Howard has the key role in the movie, but he doesn’t seem to realize it, or do anything special with it.
To make matters worse, Colin Farrell was chosen to play young law student Tommy Hart, and it’s not a part that suits him. (If he were allowed to switch roles with Ben Affleck in Pearl Harbor, both movies would have been infinitely better off.) Farrell is something of a cut-rate George Clooney, darkly handsome with big, bushy eyebrows and a five o’clock shadow, but he doesn’t have much more than that to go on. He doesn’t do a horrible acting job, and he’s presentable in a uniform, but he doesn’t do anything to help the movie. It needs a lot of help, too.
Hart’s War is advertised as a Bruce Willis movie, which may be its worst flaw. Willis was actually a good choice for the icy camp commander, but he ends up dominating the movie by default. Instead of a battle of wits in the courtroom, Hart’s War becomes a battle of wills between Willis and everyone else in the movie, and everyone else is destined to lose.
There’s nothing that is so terribly wrong with Hart’s War to make it not worth seeing. But don’t see it anyway. Any entertainment you might gain will, and should, be outweighed by the knowledge that the movie could have been much better in any of a dozen different ways. It’s enough work to denounce the horrible badness of too many movies to bother with a work of studied mediocrity like Hart’s War, and I beseech you to find something else to see instead.