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Bat 21 (1988)

Director: Peter Markle

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From Time Out Film Guide

An unsatisfactory mix of low-key heroics, buddy-buddy humour, and anti-war sentiment, this downbeat Vietnam pic has reconnaissance expert Hackman (codename Bat 21) - a career colonel with no frontline experience - struggling to survive in a jungle crawling with North Vietnamese troops after ejecting from his plane. Making radio contact with spotter pilot Glover (codename Birddog), he maps out a coded route to a rendezvous. Cue for a cross-country hike punctuated by brushes with NVA patrols, a machete-wielding peasant, and an ambiguously angelic Vietnamese child. Certain scenes achieve a genuine tension, as when Hackman has to watch a captured chopper pilot sent into a waterlogged minefield by NVA soldiers; but this is immediately undercut by a retaliatory bombing raid that destroys a camouflaged NVA hideout, regardless of civilian casualties. Like the film as a whole, such scenes elicit sympathy more for the tacitly guilty Hackman than for the innocent victims.

Author: NF 0000-00-00 00:00:00

Time Out Film Guide

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Cast & crew

Director: Peter Markle

Producer: David Fisher, Gary A Neill, Michael Balson

Cast: Gene Hackman, Danny Glover, Jerry Reed, David Marshall Grant, Clayton Rohner, Erich Anderson full cast

Genre(s): War

Duration: 105 mins


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