Casualties of War

You don't have to be a film nerd to get a sense of a director's style. The shots they reuse (Spielberg's slow push-in on someone staring at something in slack-jawed amazement), tricks they employ (Welles loving overlapping dialogue and hiding plot points in plain sight), a favored stable of actors (Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio), and their overall narrative style. I've now seen eight movies by Brian De Palma, and I still have no idea what his style is or who he is as a director. I know his thrillers have long had him pegged as a Hitchcock wannabe, but he's done other kinds of movies, and they all seem to be shameless copies of other styles, too. Scarface and Carlito's Way feel like Scorsese rip-offs. And here, with Casualties Of War, he decided to be dollar store Oliver Stone. So maybe his identity is "cheap, formless, shameless mimic". To date, I haven't found any of his lazy copies to be anything more then adequate, and Casualties Of War -- obviously riding the wave of Platoon's success -- is no different. Ensemble cast? He tried. Michael J. Fox and Sean Penn were definitely stars at the time, and with hindsight, this movie is full of other notable actors; Ving Rhames, John C. Reilly, John Leguizamo, and Erik King would all go on to successful careers later in life ... but at the time, they were nobodies. This was literally Reilly's first movie, plucked out of the field of extras to fill a role after the previous actor got fired. With the exception of Johnny Depp, Platoon's cast was an all-star team at the time of its release. Acting? Fox is excellent. And everything after that kinda falls apart. Reilly isn't asked to do much more than babble on and on and be nervous. Leguizamo is quiet and frightened and says very little. The bulk of the time is spent with Fox, Penn, and character actor Don Harvey, and De Palma's direction for them betrays them both. Penn, as the squadron's sergeant, is downright weird, full of nervous energy and using a silly NOO YAWK accent that makes him come off like a cartoon. Harvey, his right hand man, is menacing and vicious, a snarling, rabid dog of a human. These two characterizations needed to be switched, because there is nothing intimidating whatsoever Penn's character. Yes, he's evil and sadistic -- the whole plan to kidnap a Vietnamese woman and keep her for the troop's pleasure is his idea -- but he gives off sidekick energy. I needed bloodthirsty, but he's more like a bad version of Chris Tucker in Friday. It's when we get to the direction, though, that stuff doesn't just fall apart, it deteriorates like one of those time-lapse videos of a rotting orange. Platoon was an ugly movie about an ugly war that did ugly things to the unfortunate men in it. Platoon made sure to tell the viewer that Barnes and his followers weren't born bad, they were corrupted by their experiences. Platoon frames the battles as mad, desperate scrambles; you feel like you're right there in the jungle with them. There is no Hollywood shine on Platoon; it is a movie that forces people to confront the horrors of war, and specifically the horrors of the Vietnam War. De Palma can't even get within striking distance of any of that. Casualties Of War is a glossy Hollywood production. It wants to tell you how horrible the war is, but it has no intention of showing you. There is no attempt to make the antagonists anything other than cardboard cut-outs that have BAD GUY (or, in the cases of Reilly and Leguizamo, SPINELESS FOLLOWER) scrawled on them in permanent marker. The movie pays only the thinnest of lip service to fleshing out Penn's character, mentioning he's only got 30 more days on his tour of duty, as if that's supposed to explain away why he's willing to commit kidnapping, rape, and murder. But then undercuts that as a motivation/explanation by having Reilly's character having been part of the squad for only a couple more weeks than Fox, and for Leguizamo to be brand new. How and why are their moral barometers broken? Don't ask, because you're not getting anything. In Brian De Palma's world, evil is evil, and there's no reason to explore it. But there is time, on multiple occasions, for the movie to come to a screeching halt for one or more characters to deliver speeches and dialogue that are so obviously calculated to be Serious Acting Moments, they should have OSCAR CLIP blinking beneath them like in Wayne's World. These moments are done well, sure -- Fox's roadside speech about why facing the suddenness of death should make them more careful about being good people, and the meeting between Fox and the CO in a bombed out building are excellent -- but their execution is laughable. Even moments of regular dialogue feel out of place, like Fox saying to himself "Oh God" after untying the hostage while left alone with her. WHY IS HE PAUSING AND WHO IS HE SAYING THAT TO?!? And don't get me started on the swelling, melodramatic score that feels like it belongs in a Lifetime movie. De Palma does not trust the viewer to infer emotion from a scene on their own based on the performance; every scene comes with the most tortured, overwrought orchestral piece that feels borrowed from of Out Of Africa. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the hatchet job editing that abruptly cuts off scenes that should have emotional weight like they're in a guillotine, and lets scenes that don't need to linger drag on. But worst of all is that De Palma did nothing whatsoever to differentiate Casualties Of War from being Pla2n. I know that Platoon was based on Oliver Stone's personal experiences so it isn't necessarily a true story, whereas Casualties Of War was based on a specific real incident. But both of them involve a young man only recently deployed into a platoon in Nam, having to reckon with a CO that has lost touch with their humanity who sees all Vietnamese people as animals unworthy of his presence and a resource he can exploit if he wants to. Both movies are about the horrors of war and breaking the naive illusion that war is some noble pursuit. Both involve a CO who endorses rape and the murder of the innocent, who gets in a physical fight with the young PFC, and both have a more compassionate CO getting killed. There is no getting around it, at the DNA level, Casualties Of War is a knock-off of Platoon, and De Palma makes no attempt at all to dispel that. But that's because he can't; all he can do, all he's ever done, is copy, and do so at only the most adequate of levels. De Palma is Diet Rite soda and the National Examiner and Tiger Electronics handheld games. He is a living version of The Simpsons' Señor Spielbergo. And this movie is the result.