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Movie Review — Behind Enemy Lines
By Jim Sabatini
 | | Image from Behind Enemy Lines. |
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Behind Enemy Lines was moved up from a January release date to this holiday season due to today's U.S. military action in Afghanistan. John Moore's film involves the shifting geopolitics of a Bosnian Cold War-type situation. The action is visually sensationalized and the politics less complex than in some of the flashbacks and interrogative scenes in the concurrent Spy Game. Even with quality actors like Gene Hackman and Owen Wilson on hand, Behind Enemy Lines marches forward discordantly with little detail in story or character in order to remain steadfast to its testosterone-based demographic.
In the film's credits, Hackman's name is listed after the youthful blond star most recently seen in Zoolander as rival model Hansel. The ubiquitous aging actor as Admiral Reigart becomes upset with NATO, which has to move troops out of Bosnia as Behind Enemy Lines opens. There's something rotten about the armistice that fuels this operation, and the accompanying military attitudes have too much patronization written all over them.
Yet, Hackman and Wilson blend in nicely with Moore's MTV sensibilities. Wilson doesn't play his flier Burnett like a cocky top gun, though he likes to navigate the F/A 18 Superhornet. And as in the U2 incident, he gets downed while taking pictures during a reconnaissance mission over Bosnia by Serbian troops and his pilot friend Stackhouse is subsequently executed. But Burnett manages to elude those who think he's part of a secret op, maybe not so different than the kind depicted in Spy Game.
Perhaps the villain of Behind Enemy Lines is Joaquim de Almeida's NATO Admiral Piquet, who annuls Burnett's rescue in hostile territory with no apparent explanation. Moore allows Wilson to be the action figure after Reigart emphasizes staying on the move before a peaceful drop zone can be reached. The script by David Veloz and Zak Penn resembles the better BAT-21, which also starred Hackman along with Danny Glover. And Moore regularly cuts between the riled Reigart, with Hackman finding his Crimson Tide side, and the ragged Burnett trying to evade and survive in a battle-scarred Bosnia.
The direction by Moore is amplified by rock music in unison with the rounds of ammunition and explosions following Burnett, who can escape the Serbians with some fancy editing. Like the First Blood films, which have the same chase and rescue storyline, the military on Burnett's trail doesn't have the combat training one would expect, considering the efforts made to track him down.
Similar to The Watcher, Behind Enemy Lines lets the action dictate its straightforward direction. And Hackman and Wilson, who are father and son in the upcoming comedy The Royal Tenenbaums, are kept in an acting vacuum, much more than in the former's aforementioned Tide and the latter's Shanghai Noon.
Besides the anxious admiral and the downed marathon man, de Almeida doesn't have much to add as the slippery, somewhat rude NATO guy, and the two chief Bosnians—played by Olek Krupa and Vladimir Mashkov (15 Minutes) as the leader and a vicious tracker—are broadly drawn.
Within the boisterous escalating sequences that never really have any juicy twists or tingling instances, Moore works well with his photographer and designer to make the settings feel harsh, using darkish gray tinting and plenty of rotting stone edifices. But the stark, creative sights of Behind Enemy Lines are upstaged by too much technological tunnel vision that unfairly traps its gifted actors in front of the camera.
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