COURAGE UNDER FIRE (55)

Directed by: Edward Zwick

Starring: Denzel Washington, Meg Ryan, Lou Diamond Phillips

The Pitch: An Army Colonel, assigned to investigate (i.e. rubber-stamp) the proposal to award a posthumous Medal of Honour to a female flier killed in the Gulf War, finds conflicting accounts of the woman's death.

Theo Sez: Anyone who felt slightly nauseated by the hi-tech War-as-showbiz dazzle of Desert Storm is unlikely to be mollified by this sombre, thoughtful drama, all about the stress suffered by Our Troops during the war (you may, perhaps, legitimately wonder how that compares to the stress suffered by the hapless soldiers on the Other Side, but that's irrelevant - besides, they're only Eye-raqis). To be fair the film is mercifully free of patriotic claptrap, and, with its RASHOMON-like plot, generally absorbing enough to overcome even its central miscasting (Washington too much of a straight-arrow to convince as an on-the-skids officer with a drinking problem - you keep expecting him to put down his glass and say "Not for me, I'm driving"). The problem is really the conventionality of the film's thinking, giving its characters little this-is-who-I-am speeches ("I like trains," muses macho soldier Phillips; "big, tough, iron") and tying everything up in a big sentimental climax so unadventurous you can almost feel yourself switching off emotionally. It's a lot like this director's GLORY, or like A FEW GOOD MEN without Jack Nicholson : a fine, solid film that it's hard, in the end, to get terribly excited about.