Behind Enemy Lines Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)December 6th, 2001
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
BEHIND ENEMY LINES
Rated PG-13, 106 minutes
Directed by John Moore
WHERE, WHEN
Now playing at UA South
There are good characters, smart dialogue, lively action, great scenery, and a compelling story in "Behind Enemy Lines", a patriotic adventure set in the Bosnian conflict, but they're sabotaged and sunk by an eager director caught somewhere between a music video, a soda commercial, and a computer game.
The director is first-timer John Moore, who brings with him skills honed in the commercial business, and he displays them proudly in shots like one in which the hero perches, a lonely figure on a mountain peak, whilst the camera soars around and around in graceful 360s as if celebrating one of those rugged SUVs that has made it to the top and found a refreshing soft drink there.
But Moore plays fair. He announces his commitment to cliché in the first frame, when he superimposes over an aircraft carrier the legend "Somewhere in the Adriatic….." The story is presumably based on the ordeal of Capt. Scott O'Grady, who was shot down over Bosnia in 1995. But real-life adventure can be so boring; Moore and writers David Veloz and Zak Penn have perked it up with lots of running and shooting and exploding.
On board the carrier, and none too happy about it, is hotshot Navy fighter jet navigator Lt. Burnett (Owen Wilson), whose disappointment at not having an enemy whose name he can pronounce and on whom he can drop bombs at will has led him to tender a letter of resignation to his boss, Adm. Reigart (Gene Hackman). Reigart retaliates by sending Burnett and his pilot Lt. Stackhouse (Gabriel Macht) out on a Christmas day mission, another of those tedious fly-where-you're-told jobs. They disobey orders, fly over a no-fly zone, see something shocking, and get shot down by Serbs.
Soon Burnett is on his own, radioing in his predicament to the ship and trying to make it to a point where they can send a chopper to pick him up, while the relentless Serb commander Lokar (Olek Krupa) understandably tries to nail him before he can escape and report what he has seen. Complicating the rescue effort is a power struggle between Reigart and his boss, French NATO commander Adm. Piquet (Joaquim de Almeida), who arrogantly insists that saving one rules-flouting American isn't worth jeopardizing the peace treaty and hundreds more lives (it's the old Saving Private Ryan dilemma.)
If you think Reigart is going to sit still for that kind of foreign pussy-footing, you don't know American war movies. In fact, this movie is a celebration of American pluck in disobeying military orders. Burnett gets in his heroic pickle by disobeying orders, and Reigart saves his boy and his honor by disobeying orders. You can bet this is not one they'll be showing at the service academies.
Still, there's fun to be had. Wilson is appealing as the happy-go-lucky disgruntled flyer, Krupa layers the face of Serbian evil with a hint of ironic intelligence, Almeida adds a worldly twinkle to bureaucratic banality, and Hackman is always wonderfully Hackman, even if in this he sometimes seems to wish he were doing it somewhere else.
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