Movieline

On DVD: Colin Farrell's Straight-to-Video War Wounds

So few movies actually get hoisted into theaters nowadays (a fraction of the number we saw 20 or 40 years ago) that each release seems to have the import and ambition of a moon landing. (Or, they're made to seem like moon landings, so we won't want to miss it and get left behind the herd.) This means that some movies with marquee-brand stars end up going straight to video -- which used to be the dumping ground for the truly unmarketable but is now simply a B-movie delivery system. There need not be shame any longer if your movie's road takes you straight to Netflix and Blockbuster.

Thus, you step up to something like the Colin Farrell film Triage, directed by Bosnian hotshot Danis Tanovic (who won an Oscar for No Man's Land), and you know you don't have to wonder what, if anything, went wrong. But it's still hard not to, particularly given the film's hot-topic subgenre: the Journalist-in-a-War-Zone thriller, this time Kurdistan circa 1988. Farrell is the standard-issue fearless, gotta-get-the-shot photog running into the firefights, with a less gung-ho partner-pal (Jamie Sives) who also happens to be expecting a baby back home in Ireland. The boys trail after a Kurd unit and soak in its field-hospital carnage (Branko Djuric plays a cynical doctor who routinely mercy kills the more heavily maimed soldiers), and then, in a cut, Farrell wakes up on a stretcher himself, traumatized and battered, and we have no idea what happened.

Nobody knows but Farrell's hardcase, and he's keeping it to himself. Which is where you meet the film's marketing handicap: Back home, Farrell (who was also a producer) grumps and deflects wife Paz Vega's concern, and tells no one why his buddy is taking so long to return. The film goes completely passive, and you wait, and eventually Christopher Lee is summoned, as Vega's Spanish psychologist uncle, wizened from working on "reforming" Franco's death-squad leaders. Lee's grizzled coot subjects Farrell's walking wounded to radical therapeutic prodding, trying to uncover the truth.

So, it is in effect a remake of Fred Zinnemann's The Men, and Farrell is the doe-eyed Brando throwing up his defenses while everyone else worries. The film saunters but does not crash -- just don't expect Under Fire or Salvador or Welcome to Sarajevo, and do not expect more than a hesitant half-dose of political context on behalf of the beleaguered Kurds. Still, Farrell is the supercool, hygienically irresponsible guy we've grown to love, and it's no small pleasure to see Lee, looking quite Aragonian, take on the crusty gray-panther role usually gifted to Michael Caine or Max Von Sydow.

Tanovic lost control of his movie's momentum but not its knack for gruesome killing-fields poetry -- the best scene is a flashback to Rwanda, where a native woman compels Farrell to find which skulls in a great pile belong to her husband and sons. Which he does, pretending to recognize them from a photo. The movie's got hard-bitten wisdom hidden in it, about civilian life in war, about surviving, if you care to look.