Rescue Dawn

What’s surprising about this well-done but familiar-seeming POW escape picture is that it shows no signs of its chaotic creation. There was a fascinating article about its making in the New Yorker a couple years back, which suggested that when it comes to cinematic madness in the jungle, Werner Herzog makes Francis Ford Coppola look like a milquetoast. And sure, he starves and tortures his actors, until they willingly chow down on a bowl of maggots or a raw snake, but the story is smoothly told, in a manner befitting a production company called “Top Gun.” Herzog does not quite go Hollywood in a feature remake of his excellent 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, but he does find in his fellow German all the qualities he admires most in Americans, “courage, perseverance, optimism, self-reliance.” Dieter is fiercely loyal to America because the Air Force gave the immigrant the chance to fly, so when he is shot down on his first mission, a covert bombing run into Laos in 1965, he adamantly refuses to renounce his adopted country to secure better treatment when captured, and immediately starts planning his escape. Christian Bale is excellent in portraying the demented joyfulness of Dieter’s survival instincts. He drags an equally excellent Steve Zahn along on his mad slog through the jungle, while a quirky Jeremy Davies refines his continuing portrayal of rational cowardice in extreme situations. One might expect a more overtly oppositional political stance from Herzog, but this conventionally rousing story of heroism is really another of his tales of crazy human encounter with nature in the raw. Alongside Grizzly Man, you could say that sometimes the bear eats you and sometimes you eat the bear (or the snake). (2007, dvd, n.) *7* (MC-77.)