Friday, Feb. 15, 2002 | 9:57 a.m.
No one in "Hart's War" is who they seem to be at first blush. Evil characters perform good deeds, and so-called good characters go bad; by the end of this World War II courtroom drama, you've followed the characters back and forth enough times to provoke neck strain. It's like watching a tennis match, only with the players changing places every few minutes.
Lieutenant Thomas Hart (Colin Farrell) seems to be the only one with his eye on the ball, and even he loses it more than once. Captured by the Germans in late 1944, the young law student has never seen combat and scarcely seen the battlefield; working in headquarters by his father's good graces, he had only seen battle lines as "pins on a map." He breaks under interrogation and is sent to a prison camp commanded by Colonel Werner Visser (Marcel Iures).
The camp's ranking prisoner, Colonel William McNamara (Bruce Willis), immediately sizes up Hart as a spoiled father's boy and places him in the enlisted men's barracks. Shortly after, he uses him as the intermediary between the soldiers and two black airmen (Terrence Howard, Vicellous Shannon) by placing them in the same barracks.
In short order, one of the officers is executed and the other is framed for the murder of a white enlisted man. McNamara appoints Hart as the officer's defense attorney, and that's about all that happens the way you'd expect. Everything that transpires beyond that point is inexplicable.
For example: Visser attempts to befriend Hart as a fellow Yale man. "They don't take half-wits," Visser says, "or at least they didn't when I went there." As masterfully played by Iures, Visser is a walking contradiction: a Nazi who loves the music of Sidney Bechet, is fascinated by American law ("sounds like fun") and rebukes his opposite number for being racist. His scenes with Willis are the most engrossing in the film, and you wish there could be more of them.
As McNamara, Willis steps in familiar cadence; we've seen his steely-eyed military man before (most notably in "The Siege"), but that doesn't mean he isn't a pleasure to watch. It's a one-note, John Wayne turn -- exactly what the role needed. He's so sure of his footing you don't have to think about him.
Instead, you concentrate on Farrell and Terrence Howard, who plays the accused officer Lieutenant Lincoln Scott. Both are saddled with the preachiest dialogue elements of Billy Ray and Terry George's screenplay, and even though they work hard, they can't help but approximate miniseries actors under the weight of the speeches they're forced to give. Whatever happened to strong and silent?
For that matter, whatever happened to the basic WWII drama? Even the human-scale "Enemy at the Gates" was pumped up with CGI-enhanced combat sequences -- fluid, noisy sequences that resembled "Star Wars" more than "Stalag 17." Director Gregory Hoblit interrupts the flow of "Hart's War" with a meaningless dogfight sequence, seemingly just because it looks good.
That aside, "Hart's War" is a taut, engaging drama with enough smarts to overcome its obstacles. Right up to the end, you're looking in the wrong direction -- fodder for a perfect ambush.
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