Straight escape

>> Werner Herzog goes mainstream with
the POW drama Rescue Dawn

by MATTHEW HAYS

There was plenty of head-scratching at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, when Werner Herzog’s latest film, Rescue Dawn, had its premiere. The movie is a well-done, but quite standard, based-on-a-true-story (namely, the story told in Herzog’s 1997 doc Little Dieter Needs to Fly) feature about a POW who struggles to survive.

In some respects, it’s a rather non-descript film. There’s nothing aesthetically flashy about it, no great stylistic flourish nor any serious narrative trick. And there’s nothing wrong with that—but coming from a director like Herzog, it leaves the viewer a bit taken aback.

This is the director, after all, behind such genre-defying oddities as Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) and Grizzly Man (2005), among many others. He’s built a reputation for having a penchant for the bizarre, and has always defied expectations.

And that’s all the more reason to be mystified by Rescue Dawn. It’s a solid movie in which Christian Bale plays an American soldier who is captured by Vietnamese authorities in the midst of the Vietnam war. Held for an eternity, Bale must do everything and anything he can to survive (it also provides the actor with another opportunity to starve himself for the sake of a movie—something he really seems to be into). There are nasty culinary scenes, in which Bale must eat disgusting things for sustenance, and there’s all sorts of infighting with other inmates. Then, of course, there’s the obligatory escape plot, which never goes quite as planned.

Herzog handles all of this quite competently. You feel for the prisoners, and yearn for their safe escape. (And Steve Zahn offers another superb supporting performance; damn, this guy is good.) But Herzog fans will probably remain puzzled. There are few surprises here, with the script sticking to many of the conventions we expect of the genre—and there’s no Verhoeven-style irony to undermine anything.

My best bet is that Herzog was trying to reach the broadest mainstream audience possible to make a statement about the importance of respecting the Geneva Conventions, given that Bale is tortured relentlessly in Rescue Dawn. It’s a noble cause, for sure, but it makes for passing, standard entertainment, rather than something truly revolutionary.

At press time, Rescue Dawn’s release
had been postponed to an unspecified later date

>> Movie Listings