Redacted

REDACTED (2007) - Sept. 12, 2007
If Brian De Palma wasn't personally present at the screening I attended, I would have seriously questioned whether he even directed this film at all. This movie goes wrong on so many different levels I'm not even sure I can list them all. For one thing, it is directed with absolutely none of De Palma's usual style. The whole thing is meant to have a documentary-like feel, with most of the footage supposed to be shot by one of the characters. But De Palma is clearly the wrong man for this type of style, as the whole thing looks unappealing and artificial. The dialogue ranges from clunky to laughable (a lot of it was supposedly improvised, which isn't surprising), and the characters are all broadly-drawn and two-dimensional. Perhaps if the actors had been good they could have elevated the material, but they were all quite terrible. Then there are the little things, like the supposed clips from a French documentary which seem very out of place, and the fact that most scenes are bridged by intentionally amateurish looking transitions (such as a page wipe and similar effects). There is a very (very very) heavy-handed anti-war message here, and I suspect that if people embrace this film it will be more for the message than the actual content (I can only assume that the best director prize at Venice had something to do with this, because this is inarguably a bad-looking film). I thought that the Black Dahlia was the nadir of De Palma's career, but boy was I wrong. Stick to the riffs on Hitchcock, De Palma. *1/2