Movie Review: Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is, unfortunately, director Ang Lee's long one-time stumble.
Or, given the football-game thrust of the film, make that a fumble.
Adapted from the 2012 Ben Fountain novel of the same name by Jean-Christophe Castelli, BLLHW is a military dramedy that focuses on the 19-year-old title character, a soldier played by British newcomer Joe Alwyn, who has been brought home for a victory tour after participating in a harrowing battle in Iraq.
Billy is an infantryman who is recounting for us the final hours before he and his fellow Bravo Squadron soldiers must return to Iraq, perhaps – and very, very hopefully – with a movie deal in place to pay further tribute to their "accomplishments" in Iraq.
But as the film proceeds, flashbacks provide insights into the stark contrast between the way the American public perceives what happened during that military encounter with the enemy and what actually occurred.
Much has been made of the way director Lee – who has twice earned Oscars as Best Director (for Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi) – has undertaken a technological experiment by not only shooting BLLHW in 3-D, but also bypassing the standard process of shooting at 24 frames per second and instead going the high-definition route: a rate of 120 frames per second.
It might be worth mentioning that director Peter Jackson shot his Hobbit flicks at 48 frames per second, but the weak content rendered all technical innovation more or less futile.
Well, it has happened again.
Relish the high-def imagery and crystal-clear focus if you so desire, but BLLHW is so awkward and ineffective in every other way – the characters, the narrative, the dialogue, the casting – that the visuals barely matter.
The untoward stunt casting of three prominent, telling supporting characters is perhaps the film's oddest out-of-synch component.
We never truly get used to, never switch over in our consciousness from actor to character, and never fully buy Chris Tucker as a dynamic agent/manager trying to land a movie deal for the Bravo Squadron, Vin Diesel as Billy's philosophical sergeant, or Steve Martin as the Jerry Jones-like owner of the Dallas Cowboys-like football team hosting the Bravo Squadron on Thanksgiving as part of its celebratory halftime show.
The simple truth here is that the wonderfully accomplished Lee (also The Wedding Banquet; Eat Drink Man Woman; Sense and Sensibility; The Ice Storm; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) is well off his game.
Who knows: perhaps the technical innovation clouded judgment about the film's narrative and texture and production values.
Although Bravo Squadron has survived a brutal battle that received considerable media coverage, while the soldiers are subsequently being paraded around as heroes by the U. S. Department of Defense, some of them – Billy, for one – feel anything but heroic.
As Army Specialist Billy says at one point, it feels strange to be honored for his behavior on the "worst day of his life."
But once this dichotomy is hammered home in one succinct sentence, the film has nowhere to go, high frame rate or not.
Oh, there are subplots, including a romantic thrust involving Billy and one of the cheerleaders, played by Makenzie Leigh, but none of them, including this one, register as other than artificial or superficial or both.
And we remain uninvolved spectators as if at a busy halftime show gazing at a movie that's at war with itself.
So we'll be guilt-ridden about 2 stars out of 4. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk doesn't even talk the talk.
