The Great Raid (Director's Cut) [Blu-ray] DVD
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 Rating: - Prisoners of Miramax
Some films just get made simply because so much time and money has been wasted developing them that it almost seems unthinkable not to make them even though everyone at the studio has long since lost interest. Case in point The Great Raid, one of Miramax's infamous shelf-hoggers. Initially intended as a Steven Spielberg-Tom Cruise vehicle before they got a better offer from the Martians, it finally went before the cameras in Australia and China in 2002 with the less than A-list combo of director John Dahl and an underpowered cast headed by Benjamin Bratt, James Franco, Joseph Fiennes and Connie Nielson only for Harvey Scissorhands to spend three years tinkering with the cut (Disney later claimed that, like the 45 other films still on the shelf at the time they parted company, the Weinsteins shelved it so it wouldn't affect their performance-related bonus and severance pay), by which time it had cost some $70m or more. Junked in a few theatres to no discernible business in their let's-wreck-the-joint-for-the-new-management spree when they started their new company, it never made it across the Atlantic, quietly sneaking out onto DVD when no-one was looking.

While it's easy to see why Spielberg and Cruise bailed - not enough drama, no big star role - the end result certainly isn't anything to be ashamed of. Based on the most successful rescue mission in US military history, when a group of untested Rangers rescued 500 prisoners of war in Cabanatuan in the Philippines before their Japanese captors could kill them, it's the kind of film you're surprised wasn't made decades ago. Even the casting of Fiennes seems strangely reminiscent of James Fox (an actor his career seems to be aping more and more lately) in the undervalued King Rat and even if the film is never quite as stark, it surprisingly avoids historical revisionism or excuses for the Japanese. The opening sequence, though not excessively gory, is genuinely shocking in its callousness, and unlike Pearl Harbor the film makes no attempt to water down the brutality of the Japanese Army to those they deemed inferior races, Allied prisoners and Filipino civilians alike: it's hard to see this selling many tickets in Japan.

Curiously its biggest problem is its historical accuracy: the determination to (for the most part) avoid phoney heroics unfortunately isn't matched by an ability to make the long march to the camp particularly dramatic, the Rangers themselves barely registering as characters for much of the movie. At times this puts more weight on the prison camp sequences and a subplot with Connie Nielson's doctor smuggling drugs to the prisoners through the local underground (true but playing more like demographic-inspired fiction at times) than they can bear, with much of the middle of the film sagging, especially compared to the surprisingly powerful ending. As with most P.O.W. films, the actors look too healthy despite their best efforts and the desaturated photography has become too much of a war movie cliché to impress anymore, but there's a sincerity to the film and a pride in what these men did that carries it over many of its rough patches: it's hard not to feel moved by the lengthy archive footage of the real liberated prisoners and their rescuers at the end (the 2-disc director's cut DVD also includes also of powerful documentaries with veterans). One niggle though: while most of the cast make credible enough soldiers, filmmakers really should stop casting Dale Dye as officers - he may be the only real soldier in the picture, but he never convinces as one on screen and his cameos are starting to get as annoyingly gratuitous as Michael G. Wilson's in the Bond films.

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