Movies

01:00 AM EDT on Friday, August 12, 2005

BY MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal Arts Writer

One of the most harrowing adventures of World War II, and the most successful rescue attempt ever made by American soldiers, is also one of the least known U.S. military exercises.

All that changes in The Great Raid, director John Dahl's meticulously graphic recounting of the events over five days at the end of January 1945 when 121 untested soldiers were sent into the Philippine jungle to rescue 500 survivors of the Bataan Death March being held in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp by 1,000 enemy soldiers of the feared Japanese Military Secret Police.

To get to the Cabanatuan POW camp they must sneak through enemy lines where 10,000 Japanese troops have massed in anticipation of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's retaking of the Philippines. Time is running out, both because of the imminent surrender of the Japanese forces and because of recent Japanese orders to kill all prisoners of war, so there will be no witnesses to their war crimes.

Although its release has been timed to almost coincide with the 60th anniversary of the Japanese surrender (Aug. 15), The Great Raid is a movie that may never get to play Tokyo. It's an emotionally draining film in which the sons of the Rising Sun Empire come out looking very bad. It's an unnerving look at the brutality of war.

The film plays on several levels with a series of subplots, some of which are more interesting and involving than others. This is a result, perhaps, of having been based on two books -- The Great Raid on Cabanatuan by military historian William B. Breuer and Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides -- both historically hefty. The script for The Great Raid, by Carlo Bernard and Doug Miro, tries to cram as much from all sides of the equation into the plot, with the result that some of it seems plodding.

On the plus side are the sequences inside the Cabanatuan camp, especially the friction that develops between the commanding officer of the POWs and the Japanese leader of the camp.

Joseph Fiennes lost a great deal of weight to play the gaunt, heroic Maj. Daniel Gibson. He has been in the camp three years but finds himself facing new dangers -- both from his advanced case of life-threatening malaria and from the new camp leaders who ask for compliance but are secretly planning to eliminate all the captive soldiers for whom they have nothing but disdain. Under the Japanese code of war they look upon the prisoners, who have surrendered in battle, as cowards. When one man tries to escape, the Japanese orders decree that 10 others will be cut down. And they are, with precise brutality. Some of The Great Raid is difficult to watch.

A subplot is set in Japanese-occupied Manila (actually shot in Shanghai, China) involving American nurse Margaret Utinsky (Connie Nielsen) who has stayed behind to comfort the sick and secretly to send supplies of quinine to Gibson. Margaret and Gibson have long admired each other from afar. But straight-arrow that he is, Gibson stayed away because Margaret was married, even though her marriage had become a loveless relationship. Although her husband eventually died in battle, by that time Gibson was a Japanese prisoner.

Margaret's sequences have an urgency and suspense -- at one point she's interrogated by a cool, white-suited man from the Secret Police; in another she's lined up with the hospital staff who are going to be fingered for aiding the Americans.

Unfortunately, those qualities are mostly absent from the lead-up to the rescue raid. These sequences -- primarily played out between Benjamin Bratt as Lt. Col. Henry Mucci and James Franco as Capt. Robert Prince, who plans and leads the raid -- lack urgency, even though time is running out. For a long time, not much really happens as the rescue squad prowls through the jungle brush, trying to steer clear of the Japanese. At one point Prince draws a plan for the raid in the dirt, but this takes up so much screen time and sounds so unwieldy and complicated that it's amazing it ever panned out.

Eventually, however, there's an exciting firefight sequence as the Americans attack the camp. At this point The Great Raid takes off and begins to seem like a real old-fashioned war movie. All that's missing is John Wayne.

Dahl bookends The Great Raid with archival newsreel footage. At the start we see the action in the Pacific Theater which led to the American defeat at the hands of the Japanese and the Bataan Death March when 70,000 prisoners were ordered on a 60-mile forced march in searing heat. Some 15,000 of them died.

During the film's closing credits we see the end of the occupation of the Philippines and the return of the survivors to San Francisco and the waiting arms of their loved ones. Like much of The Great Raid it's an emotionally powerful moment that makes you want to cheer.

***

The Great Raid

Starring: Benjamin Bratt, James Franco, Connie Nielsen, Marton Csokas, Joseph Fiennes, Motoki Kobayashi.

Rated: R, contains violence.