When this movie came out, it seemed like some idiot in Hollywood had decided that Owen Wilson is a great actor and could be the next Paul Newman or maybe just a Tom Cruise knock off. Whoever he is, I think he was wrong. There may be certain roles that Wilson is fine in, but more intense ones are not his thing.
In Behind Enemy Lines, Wilson plays Chris Burnett, a pilot/navigator for the Navy flying over Bosnia during the conflict there. While on reconnaissance they get lost and end up in the wrong place, seeing something they were not supposed to see. They are shot down and Stackhouse (played by Gabriel Macht) is executed by the men who shot them down.
Burnett is now on the run and being pursued. He can make contact with his commanding officer Reigart (played by Gene Hackman), but Reigart cannot send out forces to rescue him due to his position and the current cease fire.
I didn’t like Behind Enemy Lines for a number of reasons. The biggest is a common complaint I have with action films, which seemed to be here even worse than usual. I get so tired of movies where the protagonist seems to exist in a bullet proof bubble. You can have 50 guys shooting machine guns at him and they miss every time while he gets off one shot and kills a baddie!
Owen Wilson does OK in the role. Part of it is the script itself. He’s not happy in the Navy, he wants to resign you’ve seen it before. Wilson just doesn’t seem to have any heart in these set-up pieces, it’s as though he wants to get through them so he can do what he thinks will be “fun” parts of the script later on. His whole performance felt like a sort of “look at me, I can do serious” kind of thing.
This type of material has been done better many times before and Gene Hackman is a good actor doing his best with it. Reigart is unfortunately a very one dimensional character. I don’t blame Hackman for it, he does what he can, but there are really no surprises in how he’s going to act during the rest of the movie or what’s going to happen. He deserves better.
This could be almost any film that has come out in the past five years. The protagonist is being relentlessly pursued by an evil assassin for some reason or other. Throw in the I love America and America is great and it’s every other country that screws us up mentality and you pretty much have this picture. The only thing that surprised me about that was that this was filmed before 9/11 and released just after it, so it couldn’t have been riding on the coattails of that newly found patriotism.
The script seems pretentious too, but it wants to be taken as a serious film when it’s really just another action flick. I don’t agree with setting a movie in a war-torn country and intermixing the predictable dialogue and action sequences with a serious subject and some horrific images of what went on over there. The tagline for this film is there are some lines you should never cross and I think Hollywood does cross a line with this film. This is no Blackhawk Down. This is an action movie that takes place during a terrible human massacre and tries to recreate the events of it.
But if it humanizes conflicts all over the world for even one person, then maybe that’s worth the exploitation I feel happens here.
The soundtrack tries too hard. The songs are played very loudly in order to create an atmosphere of how cool the film is supposed to be. Burnett is a cool guy. All the pilots are cool guys. They listen to cool music. We get it already! The special effects try to be dramatic, like the seats hitting the snow on impact or whatever which was kind of neat, but overall this whole movie just left me feeling bitter.
If you’re into Owen Wilson, then maybe you’ll like this one more than I did If your mantra is The USA love it or leave it!, then maybe this will suit you too because some people need everything they believe about this country being perfect reaffirmed constantly but for us regular folks out here, I wouldn’t recommend Behind Enemy Lines. It’s not one of those movies where if I’m flipping through channels on cable, and come across it at like 1 o’clock in morning or whatever, that I’m gonna leave on or anything like that so that’s kinda where I’m at right now with my decision whether or not to recommend this film.
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