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Home » Testosterone » The Outpost latest installment of war as hell – Boston Herald

MOVIE REVIEW

THE OUTPOST

Rated R. On Amazon, VUDU, iTunes Apple TV and other VOD platforms.

Grade: B

Among the subdivisions of the war movie is the Alamo-theme, in which soldiers usually hopelessly outnumbered trying desperately to stay alive, defend an indefensible position (often in an indefensible war) and even triumph against incredible odds. Among such films that we have seen are, of course, John Waynes unabashedly patriotic The Alamo, the Korean War-set Pork Chop Hill, the magnificent and horrifying German film Stalingrad, and the Mel Gibson-fronted Vietnam War movie We Were Soldiers.

Now, we have Rod Luries The Outpost, a drama about the Oct. 2009 Battle of Kamdesh, when 300 heavily armed Taliban fighters descended, literally, upon an American outpost in the Hindu Kush named Combat Outpost Keating. The film is based on the non-fiction book The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor by CNN Washington correspondent Jake Tapper. The action starts before the battle. First Lt. Benjamin Keating (Orlando Bloom, whose British accent does a jack-in-the-box) is the camp commander until he is not and replaced. One of the soldiers, maybe Staff Sgt. Ty Carter (Caleb Landry Jones, whom I have resisted, but he is great in this), points out that the outpost has a serious problem in terms of defensibility. It sits in a spot encircled by foothills that look down upon it. In other words, the outpost gives enemies the upper hand by giving them the higher ground. What idiot said build an outpost here? Can we have him court-martialed retroactively?

Scott Eastwood in 'The Outpost.'

Caleb Landry Jones in 'The Outpost'

For the first hour or so, The Outpost is your average war movie, waiting for the real action to start. Soldiers speak in the cynical, profanity-laden language of the military at war. Dont think about your wives, newcomers are advised. Staff Sgt. Clint Romesha (Scott Eastwood) is the most natural leader. Soldiers express love for one another. Grunts burn trash and complain about how theyre going to get cancer from it, and they are probably right. Every now and then, bullets rain down upon Camp Keating. The Americans return fire, but its hard to see behind the rocks and ridges. Eventually, mortar operators in the pit loft a powerful, accurate round at the enemy insurgents and the firing stops.

Israeli-born, West Point graduate Lurie (The Last Castle, the misguided Straw Dogs remake) makes films heavy on testosterone, even when theyre female-fronted. But his dialogue is usually smarter than the war-movie cliches we hear in this film (Tappers book was adapted by Eric Johnson and Paul Tamasy of Patriots Day). The officers have meetings with village elders, who will turn out to be mostly treacherous. One of the elders points out to the officers that the English, Russians and Americans invested 40 years and incalculable wealth into subduing Afghanistan and have failed.

But when the actual battle begins, The Outpost becomes a beautifully made, utterly terrifying and exhilarating war movie. Like the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan, this is the best part. Seeing what these brave young men will do to save their fellow soldiers under a hail storm of bullets and explosives is stirring.

The film oversells its case when it tells us about the medals won by these soldiers, many of them posthumously. Yes, they fought and died with valor. But in the end, The Outpost is like Catch-22 without the laughs or the ever-more relevant insights about war.

(The Outpost contains extreme, war violence, profanity and lewd language.)

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The Outpost latest installment of war as hell - Boston Herald

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Home » Testosterone » The Outpost latest installment of war as hell – Boston Herald