‘Hart’s War’

Bruce Willis portrays a World War II POW in this courtroom drama.   [R]

By: Kam Williams
   Sometimes, I can tolerate a little revisionist history in the interest of entertainment. But the absolute illogical leap of faith required to enjoy Hart’s War was just too much to take. Hogan’s Heroes meets To Kill a Mockingbird and Bridge on the River Kwai in this inadvertently funny film directed by Gregory Hoblit. I am hopeful that Hart’s War is merely a disappointing disaster for Hoblit, whose last film, Frequency, made my 10-best list for 2000.

Bruce Willis leads a platoon of POWs in Hart’s War.

   Adapted from the John Katzenbach best-seller of the same name, Hart’s War is set in a German POW camp during World War II. It’s a two-pronged tale, simultaneously tracking the methodical escape being planned by American soldiers and the trial of an innocent African-American, framed for the murder of a racist white GI. These parallel plots dovetail deftly in a pat denouement only Hollywood could expect anybody to believe.
   The film stars Bruce Willis as Col. William McNamara, the grizzled vet who devises an ingenious plan to tunnel out of the stalag right under the watchful eye of keepers as clueless as comic TV characters Sgt. Schultz and Col. Klink. The selfless goal of McNamara’s ragtag band of POWs is to detonate a nearby Nazi munitions plant to aid the Allied cause.
   Complications arise when a couple of downed fighter pilots, both famed Tuskegee Airmen, arrive in the persons of Lts. Lincoln Scott (Terrence Howard) and Lamar Archer (Vicellous Shannon). Because the U.S. armed forces are supposed to be segregated, McNamara needs to figure out a way to house the new arrivals without endangering the morale in his heretofore all-white barracks of enlisted men.
   Although Linc and Lamar ought to be bunking with the other officers, McNamara orders them to shack with the lowly buck privates. This delicate decision is acceptable to everyone except SS Major Wilhelm Visser (Marcel Iures), the nosy Nazi in charge of the camp. Visser, apparently more interested in race relations than escape attempts, takes McNamara to task for the blatant act of discrimination.
   Sound phony? If not, explain why any of Hitler’s henchmen would exhibit concern about the second-class status of blacks in America? After all, the Third Reich was founded on the idiotic ideal of wiping out anybody who wasn’t lily white. Nonetheless, this goose-stepping Gandhi becomes even more of a bleeding-heart liberal when Lt. Scott is implicated in the death of the most racist Southern soldier in the company. Instead of allowing the mob to lynch the unlucky Linc, Visser intervenes, suggesting, "A trial, like in your American movies. That should be fun."
   Since this just happens to be one such American movie, a trial is exactly what we get. An elaborate legal case ensues, where Scott is defended by Lt. Tommy Hart (Colin Farrell), a Harvard law student whose education had been interrupted by the war. More importantly, Wilhelm and other notable Nazis monitor every session to ensure that another innocent black man isn’t railroaded.
   However, "What Wilhelm doesn’t know," as Allen Funt would intone on Candid Camera, is that elsewhere on the grounds some POWs are digging their way out. As preposterous as the plot sounds, it was worse to watch because the acting is utterly unconvincing, as if nobody believed the silly script. Filmed entirely in Prague, on a location that fails to convey the idea that this could really be Germany, 1944.
   Marching orders: Straight to video for this poppycock.
Rated R. Contains graphic violence, profanity and ethnic slurs.