Bruce Willis’s great escape

>>Patriotism runs high in Hart’s War


by JOANNE LATIMER

Plucky soldiers from the U.S. do their best to disturb the Nazis from inside a POW camp. Hart’s War is their story. Thankfully, it doesn’t have the “Can Do!”determination of a Hogan’s Heroes episode or The Great Escape, but it does have a melodramatic court battle that leaves a (white) Yale student to protect a black fighter pilot from accusations of murdering a redneck. More than anything, this film needs a good shake to relieve it of its stoic pauses and moralism.

In light of recent talks about George W. Bush’s relationship with the Geneva Convention, the timing of this film couldn’t have been more convenient. Americans look just, as always, but crafty enough to subvert the rules to protect their own. Enter Bruce Willis. He’s the wily old war dog from WestPoint. He’s bent on blowing up a munitions factory outside the POW camp, while having a pissing contest with the camp’s commandant.

But Willis has another bone to pick. He hates egghead officers like Lieutenant Tommy Hart (Colin Farrel) who haven’t earned their stripes at the front. He also appears to be a racist, which is the first tip-off that he’s play-acting the grudge and must be up to something more meaningful in his plottings around camp.

So the next hour and a half is a slow Whodunit procedural, from the perspective of Hart, who’s left to solve all the schemes and atone for his privileged upbringing. There’s a nauseating father/son moment between Hart and the commandant (Marcel Iures), who also went to Yale, believe it or not.

The German guards are portrayed as appropriately inhuman, but the true moments of horror (camp punishment, executions, fighting, bombs) seem too symbolic to be real—as if they’re events that stand in for more interesting, lecherous events taking place off-screen.
It won’t come as a surprise that the WestPoint man does the right thing for his country, and the lawyer never betrays his client (Terrence Dashon Howard). Racism is revealed as a vehicle for a Greater Good, and somehow we’re supposed to feel that justice prevailed. :

Hart’s War opens Friday, Feb. 15