Hart's War isn't really the film its trailer implies it to be. It's more of a courtroom drama than an action flick, and anyone who assumes Bruce Willis is playing the titular Hart would be wrong, even though his is the only name listed above the title (and his face completely dominates the poster, too). Victims of War's treacherous bait-and-switch advertising will instead be treated to an oddball amalgamation of A Few Good Men, Victory, Men of Honor and Hogan's Heroes (it's not a comedy, though there is a scene where guys light their farts).
War is set in late 1944 and its main character, no matter what the poster wants you to believe, is Lieutenant Tommy Hart (Colin Farrell, American Outlaws), a second-year law student from Yale
and son of a U.S. Senator who arranged a cushy desk job for his son while the children of unconnected men battle the Nazis mano a mano. Like all post-Saving Private Ryan films about World War II, War is completely gritty and washed out, with drab blues and grays juxtaposed against white snow, which only makes the blood that much more dramatic when it's blown out of someone's skull, which happens when Hart and a Colonel are ambushed by Germans posing as American soldiers.
Before you know it, Hart, like Behind Enemy Lines' Chris Burnett, is being chased through the woods and lands face-down in a mass grave. Unlike Burnett, however, Hart is captured, interrogated by a Nazi officer and thrown on a train that takes him to a POW camp in Belgium (War was shot in Prague). Even though he's a Lieutenant, Hart is forced to live in a barracks with the regular enlisted men when Colonel William McNamara (Willis, Bandits) tells him there's no more room in the officers' inn.
The first meeting between Hart and fourth-generation West Point grad McNamara is somewhat intriguing, with Rachel Portman's (Chocolat) music intimating that one is totally fucking with the other, though we don't ultimately learn who until the last reel. But at least we find out. Viewers never really get an insight into what makes McNamara or his Nazi counterpart, SS Major Wilhelm Visser (Marcel Iures, The Peacemaker), operate the way they do. Theirs is a strange relationship of mutual admiration and complete hatred.
The bulk of War focuses on the arrival of two Tuskegee airmen who, like Hart, are officers but relegated to the barracks of the enlisted men. As you might imagine, this doesn't go over too well with the white soldiers (the Armed Services were still segregated back then). Long story short, one of the black soldiers (Vicellous Reon Shannon, The Hurricane) is killed and the other, one Lieutenant Lincoln Scott (Terrence Dashon Howard, Glitter), is accused of murdering one of his racist bunkmates. Instead of being executed by the Nazis, McNamara talks Visser into holding a military tribunal to decide Scott's fate. Hart is chosen to defend the accused.
So that's where the courtroom thing enters into the story, though War has enough sense to stop short of getting McNamara on the stand and shouting, "You can't handle the truth!" even though it's pretty clear he's covering something up. War's heavy-handed message clumsily parallels the Holocaust with America's own racial hatred (after all, what's wrong with roasting a Jew or two when you're lynching black kids back home?).
Gregory Hoblit is a slick director, but I like it much better when he sticks to the creepy and the supernatural (like Primal Fear, Fallen and Frequency). He's capable of getting good performances from people I don't usually hold in high esteem, and War isn't much of an exception (there isn't anyone I really disliked in the cast). My problem was more with the story, which was based on John Katzenbach's novel and adapted by Billy Ray (Volcano) and – dig this – Terry George, who usually pens films about Northern Ireland and their Catholic vs. Protestant battles. On the plus side, War does feature Nazis who speak actual German, instead of saddling them with a bad Colonel Klink accent.
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