Ang Lee's latest film is a bit of a mixed bag. The script and a lot of story elements feel off and take away from a very good execution. The cinematic prowess of the film is high with perhaps the sharpest image I've ever seen. It's play off really well in 3D, super crisp and clear. Lee's makes use of a lot of close-ups which is fine most of the time, but with Steve Martin's role it just fails. He seems to play this pseudo Jerry Jones and it's just pretty awful. The rest of the cast is mostly pretty fine, Joe Alwyn is a good Billy Lynn, it's nice to see Chris Tucker again and Diesel is fine in his small role as well. Kristin Stewart is great in it and I especially enjoyed Hedlund's performance too, both giving the film a very worthy appeal.

For a film about the Iraq war it shows very little of it, and even one specific scene is central to the plot, it's not very impressive by any means. The films power comes from the way Lee tells the Billy's story through his eyes. I like how it jumped from present to flashback and how the film progresses from Billy's homecoming to it's conclusion at the end. As part of the script I found the whole set-up with the super bowl event lame; I just couldn't wrap my head around the use of fake attributes, most notably a fake Beyonce. It's just distracting.

What the film also does right is capture the essence of these young adults being faced with being and choosing to be in the war. I appreciate the message it tries to tell, it's just not revolving or interesting enough to make me feel very engaged to it. Lastly Makenzie Leigh as Faizon is an absolute stunner.

B-

This is playing in NYC in one of the two theaters in the country doing it in that high-frame rate format, and while I do want to see this I will wait until it's released in standard definition. The last time I saw anything close to that was seeing The Hobbit in HFR which I thought was AWFUL and laughable. The reviews on this seem to suggest the same about its use here.

I heard the frame rate on this is 120, while The Hobbit was 60 or something. But for both films, I'm not sure if I even saw those in those original forms. BLLHW does have, as I wrote, some of the clearest and sharpest image I've ever seen. It's perhaps the best thing about it.

A rare failure by beloved Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is also one of the year's strangest films in regard to craft and release. The story and theme are simple, though: the title character (Joe Alwyn) is a suburban Texan who enlists in the U.S. Army as a teenager and serves in Iraq. After an image of him tending to a severely wounded superior (Vin Diesel) becomes popular online, he is sent on a promotional tour to wave the flag and pacify an anxious public. The tour culminates in he and his surviving squad members' ornamental participation in a Destiny's Child halftime show at a Dallas football game. The majority of the action unfolds within the stadium. Similar to Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers, a chief aim here is to compare and contrast a soldier's hard-fought understanding of bravery and sacrifice with the easily digestible embellishments and myths presented to the public. Alas, Lee's satire is devoid of venom, and any potential dramatic resonance is undercut by overwrought, at times absurdly platitudinous dialogue; a claustrophobic framing device; and a host of out-of-sync actors, none of whom truly inhabit their characters. As Lynn, British newcomer Alwyn does not exhibit much of interest beyond photogenic blue eyes, registering as vacant rather than tortured, and poor Steve Martin delivers perhaps a career-worst performance as the stadium's unctuous neoconservative owner.

These notable shortcomings in regard to acting, pacing, and tone are compounded tenfold by Lee's dramatic decision to film every scene in purportedly hyper-detailed, game-changing 120-frames-per-second 3-D. (Footage so vivid, the viewer can count the pores on Martin's face.) It is hard for a director to change the game, though, when his skeptical distributor outfits only four or five cinemas to project the film as he intended. I saw the final product in standard 2-D, as will ninety-nine-point-nine percent of others. Left-field creative choices presumably intended to enhance the sense of three-dimensional immersion, most notably nauseating closeups of actors delivering their dialogue directly to the camera, no longer have context and are distracting at best, ugly at worst. This minor and spasmodic melodrama, reminiscent of the uneven first wave of war-on-terror parables and treatises (Home of the Brave, In the Valley of Elah, Rendition), certainly does not benefit from this half-realized and inappropriate technical flamboyance.

D

This film reminded me quite a bit of Cameron Crowe's Aloha in a certain x-factor way. The experience of watching talented people just completely fail to find their material's center and rhythm. It is so full of strange tones and under-rehearsed-seeming performances.

So many of Lee's stylistic decisions are so damn jarring, too. Consider the press-conference sequence in which Lee abruptly introduces this idea of the image turning B&W when Lynn is imagining more candid answers. It is as if he, as a director, randomly decided to use this fairly flimsy PTSD parable as a platform to indulge various technical whims.

I didn't hate it as much as David did but it was definitely a mixed bag. It just felt ultimately pointless. Most of the acting was HORRIBLE (Steve Marin was especially horrendous) and it just was kind of going through the emotions the entire time. The pivotal battle sequence was exciting but could have went on longer.

The two worst things of the movie? The thrown in love subplot that was both pathetic and hilariously stupid and then the half time show. Oh my goodness. Ang Lee directing three girls that look nothing like Destiny's Child from behind to try to fool the audience. Hilarious.

But like I said, I definitely didn't hate it but I'll never watch it again.

C+

A part of me actually wants to see this, just to see how awful it is.

My feelings on this pretty much align with David's, but I can't say I hated it. It's such a lifeless film though and outside the final battle scene which is surprisingly well done there isn't much else to talk about. The lead guy was atleast trying, but you never got invested in his character and the story wasn't really engaging most of the time. I think Diesel, Tucker and Hedlund gave the strongest performances while Martin was over the top and Stewart is just there.

This is a strange, strange beast of a film. It just never connects on any level. Maybe it is meant to be the poignant story of a young man tired of war, but compelled to continue fighting alongside his brothers. Maybe it is a satire: see how industry and popular culture turns soldiers into pawns to romanticize and promote the military or earn a dollar, etc., etc. But no prong slices through and feels "real." It goes on and on, and then it ends, and it is just...hm, eh?

Yeah, this was pretty bad. Nothing really went anywhere and parts of it were unintentionally hilarious. It's harmless but very forgettable. C