FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS

"Guess what! We're not heroes. Seriously. Definitely not anything even remotely considered heroes."

In maybe his most ambitious project ever, Clint Eastwood has sadly only made Just Another War Movie; A nice, blubbery blowjob for Oscar. It is the American portion of his two-part Iwo Jima saga, entitled FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS. It is his dullest film, bland to the extreme, with boring performances, ugly cinematography, and a witless script by the biggest (and most popular) hack in Hollywood, Paul Haggis (who was nominated for an Academy Award this year for the third straight year).

FLAGS stars Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford, and Adam Beach as real-life soldiers John Bradley, Rene Gagnon, and Ira Hayes, who were part of the flag raising at Iwo Jima, and were the only three soldiers to survive the Iwo Jima campaign among the eight involved in the raising of the flag. They are recruited by the U.S. government to parade around the country and get everyone to buy war bonds, because as one government agent says, 'the war will be over in a month otherwise'.

This is where the monotony sets in. While the film starts out intriguing and does boast a nice beach invasion of the island that temporarily thrills (not SAVING PRIVATE RYAN caliber, mind you, but it's a passable sequence), its energy dies quickly. The soldiers are 'haunted' and such by what happened during the course of battle, and they hate that the government is exploited them to get a buck. 'The real heroes of Iwo Jima are dead on that island', they say. And man, do they say it. Over and over and over and over again. Hayes, an Indian-American, succumbs to alcoholism, and by the end of their journey, Bradley and Gagnon are basically acting as his crutches. The performances they give are certainly as wooden as crutches. Especially coming after his devastating masterpiece MILLION DOLLAR BABY, which was highlighted by his, Hilary Swank's, and Morgan Freeman's truly haunting pieces of acting, Eastwood doesn't get anything interesting or thoughtful out of his actors this time around.

To go along with it's sullen, prestigious, washed-away cinematography, which really misses the ball here, the script flat out sucks. As displayed in his (Oscar-winning, of course) screenplay
for CRASH last year, Paul Haggis has apparently never heard of subtlety. Apparently, to him subtlety is Bradford being served an ice cream, shaped like the flag raising, and then seeing strawberry jelly poured on it. Get it? It represents blood! And then of course, there is the obligatory transition back to the battlefield where it is exhibitied, for about the thirtieth time, that the real heroes of Iwo Jima are dead on the island? Got it yet? The real heroes of Iwo Jima are dead on that island. If you need more explanation on the real heroes of Iwo Jima being dead on the island, drop me an e-mail, I'd be happy to explain.

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