The Great Raid

The Great Raid is a 2005 war film about the Raid at Cabanatuan on the island of Luzon, Philippines during World War II. It is directed by John Dahl and stars Benjamin Bratt, James Franco, Connie Nielsen, Marton Csokas, Joseph Fiennes with Motoki Kobayashi and Cesar Montano. The principal photography took place from July 4 to November 6, 2002, but its release was delayed several times from the original target of fall 2003. The film received negative to average reviews from critics and was a commercial failure.

The film showcases the efforts of American soldiers and the Filipino resistance guerrilla, rescuing Allied prisoners of war from a Japanese POW camp.

Plot
In 1945, American forces were closing in on the Japanese-occupied Philippines. The Japanese held around 500 American prisoners who had survived the Bataan Death March in a notorious POW camp at Cabanatuan and subjected them to brutal treatment and summary execution, as the Japanese code of bushido viewed surrender as a disgrace. Many prisoners were also stricken with malaria.

The film opens with the massacre of prisoners of war on Palawan by the Kempeitai, the Imperial Japanese military's secret police (though it was committed by the Japanese Fourteenth Area Army).

At Lingayen Gulf, the 6th Ranger Battalion under Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Mucci is ordered by Lt. Gen. Walter Krueger to liberate all of the POWs at Cabanatuan prison camp before they are killed by the Japanese. The film chronicles the efforts of the Rangers, Alamo Scouts from the Sixth Army and Filipino guerrillas as they undertake the Raid at Cabanatuan.

Throughout the film, the viewpoint switches between the POWs at Cabanatuan, the Rangers, the Filipino resistance and the Japanese.

The film covers the resistance work undertaken by nurse Margaret Utinsky, who smuggled medicine into the POW camps. The Kempeitai arrested her and sent her to Fort Santiago prison. She was eventually released but spent six weeks recovering from gangrene as a result of injuries sustained from beatings. The movie ends with the prisoners being liberated.

Production notes
The Americans used a Northrop P-61 Black Widow night fighter to divert Japanese attention while the Rangers were crawling toward the camp; the aircraft used in the movie was a Lockheed Hudson, because none of the four surviving P-61s were airworthy when the film was made.

The movie was filmed in south-east Queensland, Australia utilising a huge, authentic recreation of a prisoner of war camp. In addition, numerous local Asian students were employed to play Japanese soldiers.

The movie was shot in 2002 but it was pulled from its original 2003 release schedule on several occasions. It was finally released in August 2005, by Miramax Films, which coincided with the formal departure of co-founders Bob and Harvey Weinstein from the company.

Retired Marine Corps captain Dale Dye was the film's military advisor and trained the cast in a boot camp in northern Queensland, reprising a role and practice from Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan and Platoon.

James Franco wrote about the making of the movie in his novel Actors Anonymous.

Critical response
Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe criticized a lack of character development and the pace of the film, saying, "On screen, at least, the raid to free the prisoners isn't all that great – just a bunch of explosions and combat maneuvers. Still, it's the one sequence in the film where everybody works with the same conviction. The audience, meanwhile, has to sit around with the prisoners, waiting for this to happen. It's a long wait." He concluded that the film "amounts to a noble failure." Mike Clark of USA Today said, "Just about any golden age Hollywood hack could have made a zestier drama about one of the greatest rescue missions in U.S. military history," and criticized "Franco's droning voice-over" for spelling out "every sliver of historical context", and also said "a huge chunk of time is given to an uncompelling romance between a major...and a widowed nurse." Roger Ebert, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times gave it three stars, saying: "Here is a war movie that understands how wars are actually fought... [The film] has been made with the confidence that the story itself is the point, not the flashy graphics."

Box office
The Great Raid underperformed at the box-office, grossing $10.2million in the United States and Canada, and $0.6million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $10.8million, against a budget of $80million.