Behind Enemy Lines
Enter The Escapist
“Armed with superb physical and mental training, a crack team of assistants, and ancient wisdom, he roams the globe, performing amazing feats, and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny’s chains! This - is - The Escapist!”
– Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
If you haven’t read the book — a Pulitzer Prize winner, check it out — you might not be familiar with The Escapist, that blond-haired blue-eyed symbol of liberty, true-blue friend of humanity, and Member of the League of the Golden Key. The Escapist is the comic-book creation of Chabon’s protagonists, the funny-book team of Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay, and performs great feats of derring-do while taking on the manifold forces of the evil Iron Chain.
Behind Enemy Lines is nothing more than your basic military comic-book movie. Owen Wilson’s character, a naval aviator shot down over the Balkan hinterlands, is a dead-ringer for Chabon’s Escapist (enough so that one wonders if the folks who are doing the casting for the movie version of Kavalier & Clay are paying attention). Almost from the first moment he is shot down, Wilson is on the run, chased by a hundred Serbian soldiers with the bad aim so common in comic-book movies. Although nobody in Behind Enemy Lines will admit to it, Wilson has all the attributes of comic-book heroes; he is fearless, can outrun bullets and land mines, is invulnerable to the cold, and can run for hours without food or water or rest.
(Almost, that is. Behind Enemy Lines has two of the damnedest product placements you’ll ever see in a movie. The first is when longtime United Airlines pitchman Gene Hackman, playing an admiral here, tells his pilots to go out and “fly the friendly skies”. The second is when a hitchhiking Wilson is picked up by a band of rebels. He asks for water, and they give him a bottle of Coca-Cola. Shameless stuff, you’ll agree.)
Although one senses that Behind Enemy Lines is a comic-book movie at heart, it desperately wants to be a hard-boiled military action flick. Unfortunately, it’s not grounded enough in reality to accomplish that mission. Besides the unlikeliness of Wilson’s escapes, there’s the scene where Wilson and his pilot are shot down, which is almost completely ludicrous to anyone who knows the first thing about surface-to-air missiles. Also, the movie has its own completely unlikely set of bad guys, including one fierce enemy sniper who insists on wearing a dark-blue track suit with white stripes that makes him stand out like a sore thumb in the winter landscape. (We also see Wilson taking a breather on top of an abandoned dam, where he sticks out like a fly on a plate.)
Furthermore, Behind Enemy Lines is set in the political wilderness of the Balkans, which even the experts don’t pretend to understand. (The movie handles the intricacies of Balkan politics for the dim American audience by not explaining them, which makes a certain loopy kind of sense.) Add to that the completely goofy internal NATO politics which keep Hackman from staging a rescue mission until the final reel of the movie. Add to that the insanely botched rescue mission of a French helicopter team. (In real life, the French would have landed their helicopter and surrendered promptly.) Behind Enemy Lines takes a good man-on-the-run plot and ruins it with all sorts of extraneous nonsense.
This is not to say that the performances are bad; they’re first-rate. The smartest thing that Behind Enemy Lines does is casting Wilson in the lead, his quirky charm enlivens the movie and elevates it somewhat. Hackman has your basic Gene-Hackman-is-good-in-everything role, the kind of part that he could play with his eyes closed but never seems to.
Like any good comic-book movie, Behind Enemy Lines is well-photographed in an iconographic way. (It’s almost beautiful at times, especially in scenes that feature a ruined statue of the Madonna — Our Lady of the Shell Fragments.) Unfortunately, its unrealistic attitudes do not carry over well into the realm of the military action drama. There’s nothing wrong with Behind Enemy Lines that Kavalier & Clay couldn’t fix.