2007 DVD Review: Charlie Wilson's War

There's a scene in Tim Burton's great film Ed Wood in which Johnny Depp, playing the eponymous filmmaker, sorts through bits of stock footage for use in his masterpiece, Plan 9 From Outer Space. Looking at images of buffalo herds, atomic blasts and army maneuvers, Wood muses that he could make an entire movie out of stock footage if he arranged it in the right order. Ed Wood never did make that found footage masterpiece, but Mike Nichols has picked up the idea in his execrable film Charlie Wilson's War. It seems like at least half of Wilson's running time is taken up by news camera shots of helicopters, mujahideen fighters and refugee columns. The parts of the film that aren't twenty-five year old clips from Nightline are staged with a Woodsian lack of artistry. In particular, the film's only "action" scene, in which Afghan insurgents shoot down a Soviet Hind helicopter with a Stinger missile, could have come straight from Glen or Glenda. Three dudes stand on a hill that's probably somewhere in Griffin Park, fire a rocket launcher, then jump around and celebrate, all intercut with shots from inside the cockpit of the helicopter, and images of the helicopter in flight that seem to be stolen from a different, equally shitty film. Having read part of the book the film is based on, I was all set to slam the movie for glorifying a criminal enterprise; namely, the covert arming and funding of Islamic fundamentalists by the CIA. The film is such a stunningly inept work of moviemaking, though, that the sheer crappiness sucked up all of my outrage. It's not even really a film at all in any recognizable sense. It's not funny, there's no dramatic tension or character development, and nothing approaching a rising action or climax (except for that awful Stinger attack). It's just a collection of woodenly acted, stagey conversations between a never-worse Tom Hanks, a never-worse Julia Roberts (how in the world can a woman from Georgia NOT be able to approximate a Southern accent?), and an awesome-as-always Philip Seymour Hoffman. I'm baffled how this movie got even mixed reviews (not to mention a slew of Golden Globe nominations). Is the combined star power in front of and behind the camera (in addition to Hanks and Robert, Mike Nichols directed from an Aaron Sorkin script) so blinding that most critics didn't notice the absolutely slack, lifeless, witless, uninspired dreck up on the screen?

Score: 2.0