'Hart' wins the battle but not the 'War'

Hart's War - R\nStarring: Bruce Willis, Colin Farrell\nDirected by: Gregory Hoblit\nShowing: Showplace East 11\n"Saving Private Ryan" popularized dark, haunting images of the horrors of World War II. Since then, a number of movies and TV mini-series have used the unique cinematographic style of Spielberg's masterpiece to portray powerful and meaningful stories of the suffering of Allied soldiers. "Hart's War" is the latest in the modern World War II era films, but it's not nearly as satisfying as those that came before.\nStarring Colin Farrell as Lt. Hart, a senator's son assigned to cushy duty in the headquarters section of the U.S. Army, "Hart's War" is a capable character driven drama. \nHart is captured while transporting a commander to the front lines. After being interrogated he's transferred to a Nazi prisoner of war camp in Augsburg, Germany. There he encounters the enigmatic Col. McNamara, played by Bruce Willis, the ranking Allied officer in the camp. But McNamara is not impressed by Hart, and suspecting that he may have given the Nazis the information they sought, puts Hart into a barracks with enlisted men.\nUp until this point, the movie is pretty run-of-the-mill, a typical prison drama. But when two black Tuskegee airmen are brought into the camp, the tone of the movie changes. The black airmen, officers in the Army Air Corps, are treated with disdain and disrespect by the enlisted men, particularly by Sergeant Vic Bedford, played by Cole Hauser. Soon after, one of the black airmen is killed by the Nazis after being framed by Bedford, and then Bedford himself is found dead. The remaining black airman stands over his lifeless corpse.\nWhat follows is a military courtroom drama, with a few interesting twists and turns. Marcel Iures, playing the Nazi camp commandant Col. Visser, seeks to interfere in the court martial by influencing Hart, who is now the defendant's lawyer.\nUnfortunately, the movie gets a little lost in its last third. The exposition feels a little clumsy, and the ending suffers from the fact that Hollywood seems to think that every movie it makes need to have a happy, satisfying ending.\n

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