Colibel Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Gary The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Jenni Devyn Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

jlthornb51 An incredibly exciting, true account that will move you to tears at this superb film's conclusion. Pulling no punches and accurately depicting the absolute savagery of the enemy, it is a courageous motion picture that everyone should see. The cast is uniformly excellent, with Benjamin Bratt giving the performance of a lifetime. Director John Dahl does outstanding work in bringing this story to the screen and deserves accolades for showing what kind of butchery our soldiers endured at the hands of their captors. The battle scenes are stunning and the musical score is one of the most beautiful ever composed. When the film nears the end and the actual newsreels of the liberation are shown, I was sobbing. The POW's were heroes who suffered so very, very brutally while held in Japanese camps. This film is a terrific tribute to those Army and Filipino heroes who ended the ordeal as well as the brave, courageous men and women who never cowered before the bloody swords of the beasts who savaged them.

SnoopyStyle In the notorious POW camp at Cabanatuan in occupied Philippines, the Japanese hold about 500 American prisoners who had survived the Bataan Death March. The Japanese are getting orders to liquidate the prisoners. Over the course of 5 days starting at Jan 27, 1945, Lieutenant Colonel Mucci and Captain Prince (James Franco) lead the 6th Ranger Battalion along with the Alamo Scouts and Filipino guerrillas to liberate the prison camp some 30 miles behind enemy lines. The movie switches back and forth between the rescue, people like Margaret Utinsky (Connie Nielsen) who is a nurse in occupied Manila, and the prison camp where men led by Major Gibson (Joseph Fiennes) suffer under Japanese brutality.It's an old fashion traditional war movie. It does stray into melodrama from time to time. It's also scattered among the various character sideplots. The scale of production is just below epic. There are a lot of good actors at work. However that does make me question why Benjamin Bratt is cast as the soldier in charge of the rescue. That seems to be the more important role and a more established actor like Fiennes should be doing it. This would work better if the movie picks between a prison movie or a rescue movie and put Fiennes in the lead of either. The final rescue action is done well and the movie is generally good but not great.

sprtpilot What would the result be if they made a war movie where all the actors were heavily sedated during production? Now we know! Even calling this drivel a "war movie" is a travesty. And what was the budget for this thing? Like two million? With zero for the writers? If you try to watch this without the benefit of a fast forward function, good luck to you. In fact, you can watch the entire thing while in fast forward. At that rate, it almost appears as if there is some action (but not much). Much, much better movies have been made portraying the Phillipine theatre of conflict in WWII and even the sub-set of American POWs there has been done quite well, so what was the point of this mish mash?

Roedy Green I caught this on KVOS, a station that often shows vintage films. The film was so jingoistic I though it must have been made during WWII. I about to write to the station about selecting such a silly preposterously biased film in these politically-sensitive days, that depicts the American as god-like creatures slaying the reptilians Jap hordes. At times it is as turgid as Charleton Heston in the Ten Commandments. When I looked it up, to my astonishment, I discovered it was made in 2005. Yet it smells as silly and overdone as those Woody Woodpecker or Popeye WWII propaganda films.I take it this film was created as a propaganda piece to sell the Afghan and Iraq wars, by harking back to WW II glory.The musical score is like something out of the 50s with soaring strings and dramatic crescendos, very melodramatic. The film quality is fuzzy too with bad colour, again like a film from WW II. Perhaps that was deliberate to make the film appear to be made in that era.In summary this film has no value other than as propaganda.