Red 56, Deep Blue Pictures,
Liam Hemsworth, Teresa Palmer, Aimee Teegarden, Chris Lowell, Max Adler, Austin Stowell
Mickey Wright (Liam Hemsworth) is a soldier in Viet Nam on an extremely nasty tour of duty. When they return from the field and collect the mail from home, he looks for a letter from Jane (Aimee Teegarden) his sweetheart. He finds the letter, but is shocked to learn that she is breaking up with him. Yes, it’s a Dear John letter. He is granted a two week R&R in Hong Kong with the rest of his men, but he makes up his mind to go AWOL (technically) and go back to the states to get his girl back. One of his closest buddies, Dalton (Austin Stowell) decides to risk everything to go back with him on this adventure to recover Jane.
This movie starts out with some fresh battle scenes in the fields of Viet Nam with some heavy duty scenes. Then we head back to the states and get a good look at the other side of the Vietnam situation. They are surrounded by people who spit on them or throw rocks, who despise the war and the army and who are convinced that the pair should head to Canada and renounce the army and the war. They guys need to take a good look at that. The performance by Liam Hemsworth is not bad, but it’s not really something in his wheel house. I thought Jane (Aimee) was really pretty awful. I understand that she has to play a crazy mixed up young adult, but she wasn’t very likeable. Most of what she did made no sense at all. The movie starts out with a great battle sure to create some action scenes for the trailers, but after a few minutes, it turns into a romance that isn’t really that dramatic nor is it comedic. In the end, they tried to throw in an action sequence of car chases and escape, but it doesn’t really add anything to the mix. My feeling is that this is a film that couldn’t figure out what it wanted to be. The blood and violence will turn off the girls and the long romantic chased and banter between the boys and girls will send the guys out for pizza. Nobody gets what they want out of it, and it sort of fizzles out. It seems to be schizophrenic and and bi-polar at the same time. I lived through the Vietnam era so I have a lot of familiarity with the times, but that still didn’t help me appreciate this film any more. I found that it was a fair try, but missed the mark in many ways, so I don’t highly recommend this one.
EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog
