The post-Private Ryan fashion in war films now reaches the treacherous terrain of the Vietnam War. Call it the all-guts-all-glory look: the stomach-turning level of mayhem commonly associated with the anti-war film, and yet a crispness of salute more typical of the wartime flag-waver. Writer-director Randall Wallace, who wrote but did not direct Pearl Harbor and Braveheart, has plowed some fertile new ground -- what came to be known as the Valley of Death, site of the first major battle between U.S. troops and Vietnamese in November of 1965 -- and he has harvested from that soil the provocative afterthought that the real tragedy of the event was not the number of Americans who lost their lives there (the maxim of the Viet Cong commander: "Kill all they send, and they will stop coming"), but rather the possibility that the outcome could be viewed as an American victory: i.e., encouragement to press on until 58,000 had lost their lives. Somehow, though, Wallace remains impervious to his own irony. Nothing will wilt the crispness of his salute. The big drawback, even for that purpose, is that the film enters the tribute mode so early, and with such unwavering resolve, that it leaves itself no room for emotional development. Everything is prefigured, predigested, telegraphed, heavy-handed. With Mel Gibson, Chris Klein, Greg Kinnear, Sam Elliott, Barry Pepper, Madeleine Stowe, Keri Russell. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd