Friday, September 08, 2006

If you were to take all of the movie clichés from every prisoner of war film since 1937’s The Grand Illusion and string them together, you’d get a film slightly better than 2001’s To End All Wars. It would be better because it wouldn’t also pilfer from Dead Poets Society and The Shawshank Redemption.

In 1942, a Scottish division is captured and taken to a Japanese labor camp in Thailand. On the train ride over, Captain Ernest Gordon (Ciarán McMenamin) narrates in voiceover such mind-blowing insights as, “When you surrender in war, you’re stripped of your dignity as a soldier.” Soon enough, they arrive at the camp, and before you can say “Abu Ghraib,” the abuses begin. After a series of The Bridge on the River Kwai-like encounters with the camp’s Sergeant Ito (Sakae Kimura), the soldiers’ Colonel McLean (James Cosmo) is murdered for refusing to order his troops to build a railroad. His lieutenant, Campbell (Robert Carlyle), witnesses the act and spends the better part of the film seething and plotting revenge. On the other side of the spectrum, Yankee attaché Reardon (Kiefer Sutherland) plays the part Americans usually play in these films – commercial opportunist. À la William Holden in Stalag 17 (or Bridge, for that matter) Reardon barters his way through the camp, finally succumbing to beatings and torture when Campbell turns him in.

Somewhere in between these POW archetypes lies our protagonist, Gordon, who finds enlightenment thanks to the support of fellow inmate Dusty (Mark Strong), who encourages him to use his education to teach the other inmates. In the film’s most novel turn of events, Gordon actually organizes a “Jungle University,” where he instructs the other prisoners on the finer points of Plato. Other inmates sign on to teach, including a former Shakespeare professor who never misses an opportunity to quote the bard in such a way as to provide the cheesiest voiceover possible for numerous montages.