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65Neither innovative nor profound, but it is kinetic, visceral and sometimes moving.
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505 Days of War feels low-budget in everything except its battle sequences.
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Aug 18, 201150Set during the brief, brutal 2008 flare-up between Russia and Georgia, the drama has some exhilarating moments, but they're dampened by concessions to conventionally bloviating music, overly theatrical dialogue and inadvertently comic slo-mo.
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50The movie is a continuous barrage of explosions, sneak attacks, chases, life-and-death face-offs, and amazing rescues that are as far-fetched as they are exhilarating. The cheap thrills are compounded by Mikko Alanne and David Battle's screenplay, a wallow in old-time Hollywood boilerplate, some of which you can't believe is being recycled yet again.
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Sep 1, 201140It almost goes without saying that Harlin is the wrong man to direct a docudrama about the Russia-Georgian conflict of 2008, which displaced tens of thousands of people and left hundreds of others dead. Lacking political insight or sympathy for real people (as opposed to action-movie types), Harlin can offer little more than tasteless spectacle.
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Aug 17, 201140Taking the vantage point of civilians rather than combatants allows 5 Days of War to show the toll of the terror and of the relentless, exhausting pursuit of war with unexpected force. Had it rejected the genre's romantic trappings and false heroics more consistently, the movie might've been worth the ride.
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40The hard fact, though, is that Harlin's instincts - always toward the massive and slo-mo - make him a fairly dunderheaded political analyst.
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38None of the action is coherent; shots and shells are fired, people and killed or not, explosions rend the air, SUVs spin aloft (the same one more than once, I think), and there is no sense of strategy.
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38Should appeal more to those who like to watch stuff blow up than understand exactly why the carnage is transpiring.
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Aug 25, 201130Fails both as historical re-enactment and as action-flick thrill ride.
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Aug 18, 201125A tired old quote about truth being the first casualty of war is a strange way to start 5 Days of War, an overwrought drama that, whatever its good intentions, could hardly be said to aim for objectivity in its account of the 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia.
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20Most unforgivable, however, is the film's coda in which real Georgian victims pose for the camera with pictures of their loved ones lost in the five days of war. Using real people to impart the emotions that the entire film was unable to evince is simply cheap exploitation.
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Aug 15, 201112Renny Harlin seems now incapable of taking a movie even as far as a few frames.
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0Harlin even makes poor Kilmer go running about. Just like that image, "5 Days" is embarrassingly clumsy.
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