We Were Soldiers

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

One of the best war movies of the past 20 years.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

"Black Hawk Down" was criticized because the characters seemed hard to tell apart. We Were Soldiers doesn't have that problem; in the Hollywood tradition it identifies a few key players, casts them with stars, and follows their stories.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The in-your-face style of We Were Soldiers results in a suspenseful, intense, and exhausting cinematic experience.

Portland Oregonian Ted Mahar

The film's soldiers are more the mom-and-apple-pie, God-fearing lads of World War II movies than the cynical grunts of "Platoon" (1986) and "Full Metal Jacket" (1987).

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

A powerful experience, filled with dazzlingly executed action sequences that generally avoid the rock music and drugged-out conventions of "Apocalypse Now," and even exude a certain core of humanity.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

You don't really watch the film; you survive it.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Gibson may get top billing, but it's Sam Elliott who steals all the scenes. As Sgt. Maj. Basil Plumley, a man who fires with his own .45 revolver rather than the standard M-16 rifles, he's full of hilariously colorful comments.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

Like the best war movies -- and like martial literature going back to the Iliad -- it balances the dreadful, unassuageable cruelty of warfare and the valor and decency of those who fight.

New Times (L.A.) Robert Wilonsky

It succeeds where its recent predecessor miserably fails because it demands that you suffer the dreadfulness of war from both sides. That might not make it a milestone, but it's a hell of an improvement.

Film Threat David Grove

This is a good film; strong, honest, strikingly photographed (by Dean Semler) and appropriately devastating.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Probably the best thing you can say about We Were Soldiers is that it does justice to an awful conflict.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

We Were Soldiers works. The action is well-staged and realistic. And Gibson is a commanding presence in a role that has more shadings and stature than his usual action heroes.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

It isn't afraid to genuflect to heroes and heroism and has everything it needs to connect with the resurgence of patriotism after Sept. 11.

USA Today Mike Clark

This also is the rare combat movie that deals substantially with mourning widows on the home front.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

The writer-director bestows honor -- generously, apolitically -- not only on the dead and still living American veterans who fought in Ia Drang, but also on their families, on their Vietnamese adversaries, and on the families of their adversaries too.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Gibson has the closest thing to a John Wayne part that anyone's played since the Duke himself rode into the sunset, and he plays it damn well.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Isn't a great movie; I'd say it's barely a good one. But it's a war movie that at least acknowledges the distinction between macho and masculinity, always putting the dignity of the latter over the bluster of the former.

Newsweek David Ansen

A powerful and moving experience -- once it overcomes its clunky, badly written and clichéd first act.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Manages to evoke a complex series of reactions. It both frustrates with its unrelenting sentimentality and impresses with the overwhelming physicality of its combat sequences. These in turn are so powerful they take on a life of their own, sending a message that is probably quite opposite to the one the filmmakers intended.

Slate David Edelstein

It's square, stiff, and in places cheesy; it's also authentically harrowing -- and blood-showered, blood-drowned.

Village Voice Michael Atkinson

Soldiers is righteously explicit about the damage artillery does to human flesh, and for its part, it proves relentlessly unpleasant.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

The battle, expertly shot by Dean Semler, captures the chaos of guerrilla warfare paralleled in "Black Hawk Down" and gives the film a scarring documentary realism.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Some scenes achieve dramatic greatness and emotions that reach to the heart's core. Almost as many have the tinny ring of a badly counterfeited coin.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

We Were Soldiers feels strangely irrelevant -- a well-acted, well-crafted and inconsequential visit to woefully familiar territory.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

If the action is graphic and immediate, other aspects of the movie are inexcusably bad.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

One admires Wallace's intentions while despairing at his execution. Yet as clumsily directed as his film is, it inspires compassion for Moore, his men and their foes. And in that, there is merit.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

While the movie is dreadfully clumsy or sentimental around the edges, there's no denying the strength of Mr. Gibson's performance or the power of the savage combat, a 90-minute sequence that's even more graphic than the horrific firefight in Somalia in "Black Hawk Down."

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

Fitfully effective as a battle movie, and Mel Gibson does his rugged best to take center stage without seeming to. But the movie is self-righteous in a way that's frequently unseemly.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

Leaves all the real risks to the young warriors at Ia Drang and collects easy dividends on their bravery. In the end, it honors them by paying tribute to itself.

TV Guide Ken Fox

Who these brave men were and why they fought disappears under the usual clichés, while the astounding acts of courage that occurred at Ia Drang are lost to the dust and din.

LA Weekly Manohla Dargis

It was a hellish encounter, as well as a portent of the 10 years to come, and as such deserves far better than Mel Gibson's glower and writer-director Randall Wallace's guns-and-Moses platitudes.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Ultimately, though, We Were Soldiers fails to bring as much to the table as it at first seems it might.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

The movie never generates the authority it needs to be all that it can be.

Chicago Reader Lisa Alspector

Though the questionable motives and bad planning of offscreen characters who far outrank Gibson make it difficult to take at face value one soldier's last words -- "I'm glad I could die for my country" -- some viewers will, which may be as the filmmakers intended.

The New Yorker David Denby

Yet as art this revisionist movie, grimly effective as some of it is, doesn't hold a candle to the remarkable cycle of pictures in the late seventies and the eighties which captured the discordant character of a tragic war. [11 Mar 2002, p. 92]

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

It's a shame that the book "We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young" fell into the hands of writer-director Randall Wallace ("Braveheart"), a filmmaker who wouldn't recognize subtlety and understatement if they were to attack him in the street.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Rarely have Gibson's tears seemed more fictional than in this supposedly authentic account of a historical event that's far too tragic to merit such superficial treatment.