HART'S WAR

When a vicious white bigot is murdered in a Nazi prisoner of war camp, an idealistic U.S. lieutenant is appointed to defend a black officer at a court martial hearing.

(Now in stores)

CAST: Bruce Willis, Colin Farrell, Terrence Howard, Cole Hauser, Marcel Iures, Linus Roache

DIRECTOR: Gregory Hoblit


"There are crisp action sequences, intense interrogations, a major subplot about racism and another about codes of honor and betrayal. That doesn't even get into the psychological duel between Bruce Willis' character and the German who runs the camp that ends up morphing into a full-blown courtroom drama...Well-done aspects alternate with less successful ones, and the film throws so many twists and surprises at us that it becomes unconvincing." --Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles Times

"...a movie that wants to be everything and adds up to nothing. 'War' is a film that tries to excel on several levels and falls flat on all of them...The movie treats its own characters as if they were children with learning disabilities." --Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times

"The movie worked for me right up to the final scene, and then it caved in...And I would have liked it better if the far-off bugle had been playing under a black character at the end and not a white one. It's as if the movie forgot its own anger." --Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

"Bruce Willis plays the isolated, stoical American commander as if he hasn't had a bowel movement, or an emotional one, in several decades...everybody in 'Hart's War' is at least professional; the movie grips reasonably like a solid commercial effort for close to two hours, until it more or less self-destructs in a ridiculous last few minutes..." --Stephen Hunter, The Washington Post
Sports

"Isn't there something wrong with the fact that in 2002, half a century after Sidney Poiter made his film debut, we're still getting paint-by-numbers liberal message movies that invite us to applaud ourselves for recognizing that black people and white people are the same under the skin?...It's an old-fashioned movie with a quaintly old-fashioned lesson to teach us. Think 'The Bridge on the River Kwai' as written by the committee to renominate Al Gore." --Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

"...we're situated in that familiar showbiz intersection of Hollywood and Rhine...The attempt at a greater gravity in 'Hart's War,' at least in terms of its production design, works at cross purposes with the hokeyness of so much else in the movie. Why go to all this trouble if the people who parade through the compound spout the same old Hollywoodspeak?" --Peter Rainer, New York