Uncommon Valor | | Cast : | Gene Hackman, Patrick Swayze | | Director : | Ted Kotcheff | | Studio : | Paramount Home Video | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen, Dolby | | Released Date : | December 16, 1983 | | DVD Released Date : | May 22, 2001 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), French (Dubbed), English (Original Language), French (Original Language), English (Subtitled) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | August 02, 2005 | | Summary | Uncommon Valor | Content
 | This is A great action film plenty of differnt actors and a good story about A father that misses his son and wants to bring him home. |
| Rating | | | Date | July 15, 2005 | | Summary | Politics and Patriotism aside.....this was a trite, cliche-ridden waste of time | Content
| I think a lot of the high scores given to this movie were based on emotion and patriotism. However, judged purely on its cinematic merits, this movie is simply not very good. The premise is excellent, and if properly executed, the movie could have been superb, but it rapidly turns into an endless barrage of cartoonish cliches that have all been done countless times (and better) in movies like the Dirty Dozen.
See if any of these concepts seem familiar: gather a rag tag team of misfits, take them to a secluded training site where they are quickly and miraculously turned into dedicated, disciplined fighters (in this case by chopping down trees and carrying poles around....the Navy Seals must have it all wrong). Their mission suffers several immediate reversals (usually due to the "evil" government), but the team members all bravely vote to continue anyway, improvising as they go. Naturally, a couple are killed (usually the big and/or ugly ones), but the majority emerge relatively unscathed and victorious (to a crescendo of soul-stirring music).
This movie may indeed have been loosely based on real events, but I absolutely positively guarantee you that the way the REAL soldiers looked, acted, and prepared for the mission bears no, and I mean NO, resemblance to this gaggle of ninnies.
Indeed, superficial, formulaic, laughably simplistic movies like this are not only a disservice to heroic reality, they are an insult. Check out the perfect haircut and snow white teeth on the prisoner rescued last (Robert Stack's "son")....ridiculous!!!
It's a shame that an accurate movie could not have been made about the real mission, instead of this silly, sanitized, trite visualization. One last question: what is the net gain in sacrificing four people to save four people? Is this really a "victory"? Buy it, rent it, watch it if you must....then see whose review hits this cliched nail on the head. |
| Rating | | | Date | March 26, 2005 | | Summary | Minor Correction | Content
| An excellent movie and great acting by all involved. Just to get the names right, it wasn't Patrick Swazy as reported in an earlier review, but rather David Keith. |
| Rating | | | Date | March 19, 2004 | | Summary | Good, but not great | Content
| The plot for this movie was something that could result in a war-movie masterpiece. But everything is too jam-packed and fast-moving. Dramatic tensions aren't as strong as they could have been because he haven't been given enough time to get into the story, and at 107 minutes, they could have easily taken longer. But I liked it nontheless. Hackman is a good actor who plays the role well as a father rescuing his son, a Vietnam POW. He gathers up other troops in his son's old regime who've escaped capture, trains them in a replica of the camp, and they infiltrate in a well-filmed action squence. And I liked how the final scene show Hackman embracing a rescued POD who tells him that his so scrificed his life for that man's survuval. But all in all it was good, but not great, my main complaint is that we don't know enough about Hackman's character's realtionship with his son in the first place |
| Rating | | | Date | January 19, 2003 | | Summary | Mission MIA remade into a movie | Content
| It had been a few years since I had last seen this movie but I can honestly say that it has held up better than most Vietnam War action movies. This movie is what those cheesy Chuck Norris vehicles aspired to be like but fell far short of. For all those who have seen and enjoyed this movie, I would reccomend that you try and locate the book by J.C. Pollack titled Mission MIA. Uncommon Valor was a blatent remake of this very entertaining book so much so, that you will be wondering why the producers just didn't credit the author. If I remember correctly, this was one of the first movies that actually portrayed Vietnam vets as honorable and in a positive light. All in all, this was a good movie about a topic that most Americans should think more about, our missing sevicemen. Let us not forget them. |
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