Philadelphia Weekly

In keeping with our latest trend, this week's terribly disappointing war on terror critique comes from the most unlikely of suspects--Brian De Palma. The result of this grand, subversive and infuriatingly erratic talent trying at long last to recapture the youthful vigor of his earliest piss-and-vinegar, take-no-prisoners, underground Vietnam-era satires Greetings and Hi, Mom!, Redacted is at once both outraged and outrageous. It's a low-budget, angry-as-fuck provocation--and something of a call to arms from an embittered old man who saw us going down this very same road many years ago, and desperately hates that he can still remember how it worked out the last time around.

Too bad Redacted is also kind of lousy.

De Palma has made this movie already, and I presume that any repetition is intentional. His terrific, criminally underrated 1989 box-office flop Casualties of War starred Michael J. Fox as a 'Nam grunt, conscience-stricken after platoon-mates Sean Penn, Ving Rhames, John C. Reilly and John Leguizamo conspired to rape and murder a young villager. Redacted stars somebody named Rob Devaney as an Iraq grunt, conscience-stricken after platoon-mates Patrick Carroll, Izzy Diaz and Daniel Stewart Sherman conspire to rape and murder a young villager.

"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss," De Palma seems to be shouting from the rooftops. But Casualties of War boasted a screenplay by David Rabe, the brilliant playwright who also penned Streamers and Hurlyburly. Redacted can only muster a script by Brian De Palma--you know, the guy who wrote Body Double and Femme Fatale. (Not that I don't secretly and desperately love those two peculiar, perverted movies, but they don't exactly announce their author as one who should be documenting American war crimes.)

Fictionalized from a real-life horrific incident that occurred last year in Mahmudiya, Iraq, Redacted is seriously nasty stuff, depicting soul-deadened soldiers dehumanized by endlessly extended tours of duty, working harrowing checkpoint details wherein every stray sound could be lethal, and the local schoolchildren are probably planting IEDs. Even discarded reclinersprove deadly in this scorched, bombed-out wasteland.

De Palma fragments the narrative across all sorts of mixed media, a gambit so daring I dearly wish it worked. Spilling the story piecemeal through blogs, YouTube videos, home movies, surveillance camera footage and one fake French documentary parody that's so dead-on and mean-spirited in its use of Handel's "Sarabande" that I almost wet myself laughing, Redacted tries its damnedest to approximate our modern, fast-clicking,multiplatform viewing habits, all the way down to obvious html errors on the various websites used to convey crucial plot information.

But the biggest problem is the acting. Perhaps nowhere outside pornography have you seen performances as stiff, amateurish and off-putting as those delivered by Devaney, Carroll, Diaz and Sherman, fumbling around with untenable dialogue and spill-it-all monologues divulging the themes of the movie with all the panache of community theater dropouts. De Palma's formal daring, bold as it is, demands that far too much plot development take place in front of awkwardly positioned security cameras, while characters enter and exit as if in an off-off-Broadway play, loudly discussing things they should keep secret, shattering every illusion of realism the film grasps at so fervently.

Strange to say, but as unbelievably unpleasant as it is to watch, Redacted is also not nearly as mean as it needed to be. De Palma has always been one of movies' greatest sadists, and his many cinematic failures (particularly last year's woebegone adaptation of James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia) occur when he tries to play things for pathos.

Even now, more than 10 years later, I can still recall sitting in front of my crappy dorm-room television, watching a worn out VHS tape of Hi, Mom! and shrieking aloud at its sheer vicious, vindictive misanthropy. It was pretty much the same yelp I let out when first seeing that brilliant, excruciatingly cynical ending of Blow Out, and that's exactly the kind of squeal that Redacted needed to inspire, if it was really going to make a difference.

headline: Redacted

C-
Director: Brian De Palma
Starring: Rob Devaney, Patrick Carroll, Izzy Diaz, Daniel Stewart Sherman
Opens Fri., Nov. 16

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