Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.
I must admit that the 2005 Iraq war movie American Soldiers had managed to elude my notice until now. I’m still not sure how enough people have seen it to qualify it for this list: it doesn’t appear to have received a theatrical release, but I guess the generic DVD box depicting two grim-faced young men in camouflage gripping enormous automatic weapons simply sang out from the Blockbuster racks. Before watching the movie, I had two competing theories on why it might have made the Bottom 100: Either it was a conservative take on the Iraq war and the liberals were pounding it, or vice versa. As it turns out, journeyman director Sidney J. Furie (the man behind both Iron Eagle IV and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace) has managed to make an Iraq movie that both sides have equal cause to consider complete bullshit.
American Soldiers follows one Army patrol through a single day in April 2004, and a nondescript bunch they are. Your old-timey war movies may have been cliché-ridden, but at least you could count on some reliable caricatures like Brooklyn, Country, Mad Dog, Four Eyes, Mama’s Boy and Sarge to help you tell the members of the unit apart. Here you have Sarge, and I think there’s another Sarge, and definitely a medic called Doc and then a bunch of beefy guys with very few acting credits among them. One of the Sarges spends most of the movie in a stretcher, so I was able to keep track of him pretty well. Otherwise they’re just so much cannon fodder. And oh, what cannons! Granted, I’ve never spent a day in the vicinity of Baghdad (nor in Hamilton, Ontario, where American Soldiers was actually shot), but I feel safe in saying that if a day like this had actually transpired in April 2004, the war would have ended a long time ago, because there wouldn’t be any American soldiers left.
During the first hour of this movie, I had to keep checking my DVD player to make sure it wasn’t simply playing the first chapter over and over again. Here’s what happens many, many times: The patrol rolls along in their open-air transport, repeatedly passing the same scenery as if they’re in an old Flintstones cartoon. Some insurgents pop up from behind a pile of sand with RPGs and fire on them. Someone screams “What the fuck are we doing here?” and someone else responds “We’re doing our jobs!” and the patrol rolls along for a minute or two before an IED goes off in the road and another batch of armed Iraqis pop up from behind a pile of bricks. Rinse and repeat. These guys are not only in the most dangerous place on earth, they’re in the most dangerous place that has ever existed; every person, place and thing on the screen is made out of explosions.
The movie remains plotless through its first two-thirds, until the patrol delivers a captured Iraqi prisoner to Camp Zebra, a CIA detention facility where the Geneva Convention does not apply. Suddenly these guys who have been dodging rocket-powered grenades all day turn into Alan Alda and Mike Farrell, deciding they can’t stand by and allow one of those responsible to be tortured. They storm the compound and, holding the CIA agents at gunpoint, take back their prisoner. Now, of course, they have to dodge eight or nine more ambushes to get back to their base. Eventually everyone finally runs out of ammo and the movie ends with a big hand-to-hand knife fight. Add American Soldier to the Bush administration’s list of war crimes.
Previously on Unwatchable:
83. First Sunday
84. It’s Pat
85. Battlefield Earth
86. Hobgoblins
87. The Sidehackers
