Movie Review Roundup for April 15

Two films set during and after wars open on South Florida screens today, and both fall short for different reasons.

The most anticipated of them, which opens in most venues, is Robert Redford’s “The Conspirator,” the director’s first feature in four years. Even though its plot concerns the corrupt trial of Mary Surratt, the lone

woman charged as a coconspirator in the Abraham Lincoln assassination, the movie follows right on the thematic heels of Redford’s last picture, the contemporary antiwar lecture “Lions for Lambs.” That film was a critical examination at the Bush administration’s handling of the invasion of Iraq, and Dubya’s foreign-policy legacy also looms large over the didactic “Conspirator,” — this time in terms of the former president’s overreach of executive power as a result of the War on Terror.

James McAvoy, as the young lawyer summoned to defend Surratt (Robin Wright), battles a governmental system that, like Bush’s overreaction following 9-11, is too blinded by its hatred for a certain group of people that its gut-reaction policies end up shredding the constitution – eliminating habeas corpus and so forth. Danny Huston, as the federal prosecutor, is a mouthpiece for the country’s emotions post-9-11 as much as post-Civil War, stating bluntly that when in war, the rules change.

Redford’s point may be that history repeats itself – that governments have always overreached and been blinded by ideology, often at the expense of the nation’s liberties. The fact that Barack Obama has retained many of the Bush administration’s criminal policies ensures that Redford’s point is an evergreen one. But the result could have been a lot less preachy. The movie is so obviously aimed as a slanted commentary on contemporary issues that it hardly functions as a historical document. All it lacks is a running subtitle that screams, “This is really about the response to Sept. 11! It’s all an allegory!” for the seven people in the audience that haven’t picked up on it. Redford is smarter than scripts like this, and so are we.

Elsewhere, the Scandinavian World War I drama “Winter in Wartime”opens at Regal Shadowood in Boca. It’s set in Nazi-occupied Holland, and there are none of the moral ambiguities that cloud Redford’s movie; “Winter in Wartime” is as black and white as it gets, and its message has little depth beyond “Nazis are bad.” Director Martin Koolhoven has crafted a handsomely shot, bitterly cold coming-of-age story about a boy who endangers himself and his family by harboring and healing a wounded Allied soldier. But “Winter in Wartime” is too Academy Award-pandering – too Hollywood lite – to really resonate beyond the two hours spent seeing it. The style is particularly offensive when depicting the violence of war, where Koolhoven softens the devastating carnage with tacky slow-motion.

For a film that certainly doesn’t soften its bloodshed, look no further than South Korea’s “I Saw the Devil,” a gonzo revenge thriller designed for a certain kind of cultish cinephile. Despite the buzz the film has already

accrued, the Coral Gables Art Cinema is the only theater in the area to touch it, and it’s easy to see why; it’s a gory, nauseating experience even for thick-skinned moviegoers. It also has some outstanding sound design and a few bravura set pieces, such as the epic discovery of a severed head in a river, which sets the revenge plot in motion.

Distraught over the murder of his fiancée, mild-mannered Kim Soo-hyeon (Byung-hun Lee) goes all Dirty Harry, bypassing the law and using illegal CIA technology to track the serial slayer, Kyung-Chul (Min-sik Choi, famous for his lead role in “Oldboy”). But rather simply kill off Kyung-Chul, Kim puts the man through an endless ringer of abuse – brutalizing him, abandoning him, finding him again and putting him through more torture only to repeat the cycle.

The film’s two-and-a-half-hour length is fine, and director Jee-woon Kim has a point in manipulating us into supporting the kind of rogue vigilantism that, in its own way, creates as much damage as the killer’s admirably straightforward menace. These lines need to be blurred in the sadistically popular genre of Asian ultraviolence. The problem – beyond the weak, simplistic screenplay, which many will overlook – is that Kim ultimately begins to take too much delight in his protagonist’s intricate torture apparatuses. You can’t enjoy your torture porn and critique it at the same time.