Review of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2016) by Dottheeyes — 19 Nov 2016

A rare failure by beloved Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is also one of the year's strangest films in regard to craft and release. The story and theme are simple, though: the title character (Joe Alwyn) is a suburban Texan who enlists in the U.

S. Army as a teenager and serves in Iraq. After an image of him tending to a severely wounded superior (Vin Diesel) becomes popular online, he is sent on a promotional tour to wave the flag and pacify an anxious public.

The tour culminates in he and his surviving squad members' ornamental participation in a Destiny's Child halftime show at a Dallas football game. The majority of the action unfolds within the stadium.

Similar to Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers, a chief aim here is to compare and contrast a soldier's hard-fought understanding of bravery and sacrifice with the easily digestible embellishments and myths presented to the public.

Alas, Lee's satire is devoid of venom, and any potential dramatic resonance is undercut by overwrought, at times absurdly platitudinous dialogue; a claustrophobic framing device; and a host of out-of-sync actors, none of whom truly inhabit their characters.

As Lynn, British newcomer Alwyn does not exhibit much of interest beyond photogenic blue eyes, registering as vacant rather than tortured, and poor Steve Martin delivers perhaps a career-worst performance as the stadium's unctuous neoconservative owner.

These notable shortcomings in regard to acting, pacing, and tone are compounded tenfold by Lee's dramatic decision to film every scene in purportedly hyper-detailed, game-changing 120-frames-per-second 3-D.

(Footage so vivid, the viewer can count the pores on Martin's face.) It is hard for a director to change the game, though, when his skeptical distributor outfits only four or five cinemas to project the film as he intended.

I saw the final product in standard 2-D, as will ninety-nine-point-nine percent of others. Left-field creative choices presumably intended to enhance the sense of three-dimensional immersion, most notably nauseating closeups of actors delivering their dialogue directly to the camera, no longer have context and are distracting at best, ugly at worst.

This minor and spasmodic melodrama, reminiscent of the uneven first wave of war-on-terror parables and treatises (Home of the Brave, In the Valley of Elah, Rendition), certainly does not benefit from this half-realized and inappropriate technical flamboyance.