You should expect a few anachronisms and factual errors in any film set more than ten years in the past. But this movie is completely full of them from beginning to end, and it was made not even ten years after when it was set. That's the first howler, the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 not 1992! Where do we start with the rest: if Brad Pit had been a tasty young hunk in 1992 how could he have also been a hardened assassin in Viet Nam, probably before he'd had time to have been born. How come the folk's in Beirut were chatting on cell-phones in 1982, years before they were available in the rest of the world, and when a car phone was literally that, a phone that required a car to move it! And what about the natty 2001 style thin monitor computer on the agent's Beirut office desk! Then what about the gigantic ten year gap in the plot between Brad character's girlfriend being caught and his going to rescue her, which is presented as an act of passion? Not only did it simmer well but she looked not a day older after ten years in a Chinese prison! Then that rescue.Who but an idiot would imagine that a p3 in the CIA has the authority to authorise an act of war on China! And if they did, only two choppers! And clapped out 40 year old old Huey's, when the USMC have been flying Black Hawk's since the Eighties. A stupid error made all the more glaring by the pilot of one referring to his machine as "Black Hawk One." Oh, I geddit, they are the same two Huey's they used in the Viet Nam scenes. Or maybe they are meant to be THE SAME TWO HUEYS that appeared in those scenes. You see, I don't know, in a film this full of temporal worm-holes anything is possible! Or maybe they should have spent more money on hiring choppers and less on the ridiculous overblown sound-track with its tiresome clichés comprising plaintiff choirboy's and Arabian vocal pirouettes and a clumsy abuse of themes from Vaughn-Williams.
As you may well imagine, my only reason for sticking to the end of this film was to see what more "howlers" were in store.
It seems to have been written by a twenty-something with an absolutely shameful and absolute ignorance of anything before the present. It is an appalling indictment of this director that he would put his name to such a thing.
As you may well imagine, my only reason for sticking to the end of this film was to see what more "howlers" were in store.
It seems to have been written by a twenty-something with an absolutely shameful and absolute ignorance of anything before the present. It is an appalling indictment of this director that he would put his name to such a thing.