Sunday, December 22, 2013

Company of Heroes (2013)

Director: Don Michael Paul                               Writer: David Reed
Film Score: Frederik Wiedmann                        Cinematography: Martin Chichov
Starring: Tom Sizemore, Jürgen Prochnow, Chad Michael Collins & Vinnie Jones

Unlike some people, I’m a lot more forgiving about inaccuracies in war films. I haven’t studied books on the planes, and tanks, and guns and so those things I don’t really notice. That said, however, the bar on war films was raised significantly by Saving Private Ryan and the subsequent Tom Hanks produced Band of Brothers. Even the last great war film prior to the new era, When Trumpets Fade, pales in comparison to something like The Lost Battalion in terms of visual impact and dramatic realism. The first thing to know about Company of Heroes is that it is a complete fiction, a lost company of U.S. soldiers who wind up completing an OSS mission to discover the Nazi nuclear weapons program--of which there wasn’t a working one. And though that doesn’t have to be the ruin of a war film, take The Dirty Dozen for example, this one combines it with a bad script and cartoonish action sequences that it never manages to recover from.

The film begins with the company on a routine patrol during the winter of 1944. When a sniper kills one of the men, Chad Michael Collins picks up a sniper rifle and takes him out, earning him a promotion to company sniper. Tom Sizemore, on the other hand, had his entire platoon killed shortly after D-Day and wound up being demoted to cook. When the lieutenant, Neal McDonough from Band of Brothers, gives the company a delivery mission of hams to the soldiers on the front, little does he know that they are heading right into the battle of the bulge. Soon they find themselves surrounded by a tank division and when they see an explosion in the distance, figure the Germans aren’t bombing themselves and decide to head in that direction. But what they find is a bombing test site where a dying OSS operative tells them of the nuclear program and the only way to stop it: going to Stuttgart and blowing up the factory.

The very first thing one notices about the film is the atrocious dialog. A certain amount of humor creeps into combat in order to diffuse the tension, but this film is like a wisecracking convention with crude jokes pouring out of the soldiers like they’re headlining in a Vegas showroom. It’s not just inappropriate, it actually completely destroys the suspension of disbelief. But that’s not the only thing wrong with the script. The soldiers make some absolutely idiotic choices. The first comes when they’re hiding in the woods while the Germans are taking control of a road. The German officer is standing out in the middle of the road in the headlights of the vehicles, a perfect target. If the U.S. soldiers had snuck away to avoid a confrontation that would have made sense, but instead they simply lurched out into the headlights themselves, forcing a firefight. If they were going to do that anyway, why not take out the German officer with the first shot. Later, the almost identical situation happens when they see their contact in Stuttgart being interrogated by two officers. The officers kill the contact while none of the Americans fire a shot. It’s maddeningly senseless.

For all of that, the film looks great. It has a nice color manipulation in post-production that gives it the same kind of washed out color as in Saving Private Ryan. The special effects when soldiers are shot are also very graphic and realistic. Unfortunately all of that is for naught when the story takes a sharp veer into the comic book realm. Machine guns that never need to be reloaded, narrow escapes not from the front lines but in the middle of Germany, and Russian and British pals who come to their aid are all fantastically unrealistic. Jürgen Prochnow is the brains behind the nuclear program, the scientist they must kidnap and his daughter, Melia Kreiling, of course falls in love with Collins, while Vinnie Jones and Dimitri Diatchenko come to the rescue at the end. Company of Heroes began its life as a video game, and perhaps that’s the problem. While it makes for an interesting fantasy, is certainly not something that is worthy of real veterans who fought and died for democracy in that most devastating of all 20th century wars, and in that light it’s a terrible film to watch.