Behind Enemy Lines (105 mins, 12) Directed by John Moore; starring Owen Wilson, Gene Hackman
The Last Castle (131 mins, 15) Directed by Rod Lurie; starring Robert Redford, James Gandolfini, Delroy Lindo
Va Savoir (156 mins, PG) Directed by Jacques Rivette; starring Jeanne Balibar, Sergio Castellito
Nobody Someday (15, 99 mins) Directed by Brian Hill; starring Robbie Williams
Pro-military movies have been making a steady comeback in Hollywood since the cycle of anti-war movies that followed America's withdrawal from Saigon. The new year promises a barrage of them, starting with Behind Enemy Lines and The Last Castle, preposterously plotted pictures about dedicated senior officers defying their superiors.
Behind Enemy Lines stars the tall, tousle-haired Owen Wilson who looks the way Robert Redford would do had he taken a couple of straight lefts to the nose from Mike Tyson. Wilson plays Lieutenant Burnett, a cocky naval flyer, and the plot (vaguely based on a true story) turns on his transformation from cynical gung ha! to patriotic gung ho! He starts out determined to quit the navy and ends up signing on for life after being pursued for several days in the snowbound Balkans by genocidal Serbs.
Burnett has been shot down over forbidden territory and has photographic evidence that could bring enemy leaders into the dock at the Hague. The agent of his conversion is long-serving Admiral Reigart (Gene Hackman), who's so determined to bring Burnett home that he defies his Nato superior (a surly French officer), exploits media interest (Sky TV, this being a Murdoch production) and even leaves his carrier to lead the rescue operation, before he's relieved of his command and retires. There are incidental excitements as Burnett dodges his pursuers, but it's a ridiculous film with a high body count of foes and minimal American losses.
Hackman's counterpart in The Last Castle is three-star General Irwin (Robert Redford), gallant hero of Nam, the Gulf and Bosnia, who arrives in a stark military jail dripping with medals like a Christmas tree. The author of The Burden of Command, Irwin has pleaded guilty to disobeying orders in some incident in Burundi and been sentenced to 10 years by a reluctant High Command. Immediately, Irwin shows his contempt for the prison commandant, Colonel Winter (James Gandolfini), whose eyes are as untrustworthily porcine as Irwin's are sincerely pellucid. Winter is a corrupt sadist who has never heard a shot fired in anger, and gradually Irwin restores the depressed convicts' military pride. He turns them into a cohesive force that in a climactic storm of rain and flag-waving triumphalism takes over the jail. In the process, he becomes a Christ-like figure along the lines of Paul Newman's convict Cool Hand Luke. Amazingly, the director of this portentous movie is a graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point, though the chief influence would appear to be his subsequent years as a movie critic.
Jacques Rivette is one of the original Cahiers du Cinema critics who constituted the French New Wave and is to be respected for sticking to his last for more than 40 years. However, his long, ludic, self-indulgent movies, mostly about well-heeled folk involved in the arts, have divided the relatively few people who've seen them as they've appeared spasmodically since his impressive, somewhat irritating debut with Paris Nous Appartient in 1960. That first film centres on a group of Parisians staging Shakespeare's Pericles, and his latest - Va Savoir - turns on a production of another rarely performed play, Pirandello's As You Desire Me, a piece about illusion and the re-creation of identity best known today through the 1932 Garbo movie which reverses the ending.
The film's wilful heroine, Camille (Jeanne Balibar), returns to Paris after three years in Rome in an Italian production by her actor-manager husband. Immediately, she renews her relationship with her former lover, a philosopher specialising in Heidegger, and the pair become involved with a dancer, and a sister and brother, the former an ex-jewel thief, the latter a practising one. The result is like a formation dance performed at the speed of a chess game. There's lots of vapid, high-flown dialogue about love and art conducted by cool, confident French narcissists, and some clever patterning in the plot with two major discoveries made in different kitchens. The moral is summed up in the Italian actor's search for a lost Goldoni play, Il Destino Veneziano, which he eventually finds under the real title Il Festivo Veneziano. The film's title, Va Savoir, roughly 'Who knows?', derives from the final line of a Rimbaud poem.
Nobody Someday is an unexciting documentary of a 15-city European tour by Robbie Williams, the biggest, though not the most interesting, thing to come out of Stoke-on-Trent since Arnold Bennett and Stanley Matthews. The black-and-white concert footage is interspersed by backstage interviews with membersof the travelling crew of 65 and the obsessively self-critical Williams, who began the journey hating touring but comes to love it.
Robbie Williams has a striking resemblance to Hugh Laurie and would make a splendidly gormless Willie Mossop in Hobson's Choice. The chief highlight comes when a deranged continental fan pushes him off the stage.
