 A bloody battle is being waged among the critics over the worthiness of Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers. On the one hand, there's Chicago Sun-Times critic Richard Roeper, who calls the film "an American masterpiece ... a searing and powerful work." On the other hand, there's Michael Sragow of the Baltimore Sun, whose review is headlined, "Eastwood's cliché-riddled Flags doesn't rate a salute," and who remarks, "The film has all the coherence and lucidity of a fragmentation bomb." Many of the reviews fall somewhat between those two responses to it, observing that Eastwood himself fails to take a stand -- attempting to appeal to jingoists and pacifists alike with his film about the soldiers who appeared in the iconic flag-raising photograph taken during the battle of Iwo Jima in World War II. As Jan Stuart writes in Newsday, the movie "allows everyone to eat his cake and have it, too. It's not anti-war so much as anti-idolatry, a philosophical position that plays to both 'stay-the-course' and 'cut-and-run' camps." But most critics appear to side with Roeper, including Manohla Dargis's in the New York Times. She writes: "It seems hard to believe there is anything left to say about World War II that has not already been stated and restated, chewed, digested and spat out for your consideration and that of the Oscar voters. And yet here, at age 76, is Clint Eastwood saying something new and vital about the war in his new film, and here, too, is this great, gray battleship of a man and a movie icon saying something new and urgent about the uses of war and of the men who fight." Writes Claudia Puig in USA Today: "Flags of Our Fathers is the rare action film that is superbly acted, hauntingly powerful and deeply insightful." And Kenneth Turan concludes in the Los Angeles Times: "We are close to blessed to have Eastwood still working at age 76 and more fortunate still that challenging material like Flags of Our Fathers is what he wants to be doing." |
