Review of Days of Glory (2006) by Jon H — 06 Feb 2008

[b]The acting is good... the story isn't.

[/b].

Nominated for Best Foreign Language film by the Academy, and having won the award for the Best Ensemble Cast at the Cannes Film Festival (2006), I expected a little more than I got. Vis a vis, I expected an Academy Award-nominated movie. A calibur of movie a little more... mature. While taking on any type of World War II movie, any kind of critic--from the fat guy laying on his couch to the overpaid guy at Variety--is going to compare this movie to the truly great films that have established themselves as genre-definers. With that said, it's hard to stack this film up favorably against movies like "Saving Private Ryan," "Bridge Over the River Kwai," or the mini-series "Band of Brothers.".

I can't say that this movie is anything worth raving about, because it's not. In fact, this movie isn't even close to being what it should be. The acting is truly amazing and completely sells its audience on the roles its actors portray diligently, and overall is worth the award it was given at Cannes.

Now, in terms of the actual movie itself, it kills me to say it, but this movie has so much potential, and doesn't follow through on half of it. While the plot does steer away from the traditional path that movies like it have laid out before. That being said, it loses a lot of its originality when it gives a cop-out ending, copying the ending of "Saving Private Ryan," but doing a worse job of it. If you're going to copy such a major plot point as is jumping ahead 60 years and into present day, at least do it with some purpose. It just felt like the writers couldn't figure out how to end the damn thing, so they got lazy and filled the last 10 minutes of an otherwise original WWII movie with unoriginal content.

That being said, I can't even say that the other 1 hour and 50 minutes saved this movie. It had me hooked in the beginning, and me drifting off, waiting for it to be over with an hour left.

With all of this being said, it is a respectable foreign film, but nothing [i]that[/i] impressive, and in my mind neither well-written or well-filmed enough to win an Academy Award, which is perhaps why it didn't ("The Lives of Others" did, for those of you who care). For those World War II buffs out there, I would certainly reccommend this movie, because it does revive some life into an otherwise dead genre. For those of us looking for a good foreign film to watch, I would skip this one and head to some of the other Oscar nominees from 2007.