The Not-So-Great Raid

I never fail to marvel at the ingenuity of people in marketing. What do you do with a war film that's been sitting on the shelf for two years because it's a smelly piece of shit? Flush it down the cable/DVD toilet? No. You put The Great Raid's director on a tour of right wing radio shows, where the film is touted as an exciting patriotic epic and naysayers like The New York Times' Stephen Holden are portrayed as liberal whiners who hate the film because it celebrates our troops' victory.

Here's reviewer Daniel Carlson's opinion.

"Sitting on the shelf for a couple of years, The Great Raid is one the films getting dumped on an unsuspecting public in the wake of the Weinsteins’ split with parent company Disney.

Whether it’s war films, westerns, Star Trek movies, or porn, there exists a guaranteed consumer for every film, an audience member who will show up simply because of what the movie claims to be. It is this simple viewer, this loyal but blind American, that will most benefit from The Great Raid, a plodding, dull, methodical example of how not to make a war movie. The kind of men and women who TiVo hours of the History Channel will feel right at home watching director John Dahl’s overlong, tedious tale of the rescue mission at the Cabanatuan POW camp months before the end of World War II. Anyone requiring an engaging narrative should look elsewhere."