Redacted (2007)

Directed by Brian De Palma. Starring Daniel Stewart Sherman, Patrick Carroll, Rob Devaney, Kel O’Neill, Izzy Diaz, Ty Jones, Mike Figueroa. [R]

Spiritual sibling to De Palma’s Casualties of War depicts another handful of soldiers committing a reprehensible crime: the rape of an Iraqi girl and the subsequent murder of her and her family. The earlier film was a flawed but potent melodrama of shattered innocence and visceral outrage, but this one is inscrutable and lacking in insight in depicting out-of-control racist sociopaths that go unchecked by their fellow cardboard military grunt stereotypes. Shot and assembled in an experimental semi-found footage style, and De Palma is too much of a confident and accomplished aesthete for the awkward cross-cutting and obscured compositions to not be intentional choices, but for a director known to make the camera a separate voyeuristic character in so many of his movies, it’s a strategic blunder to assemble all of its homegrown media outputs in such a shoddy, heavy-handed fashion. Worse, combining it all with so many repugnant personalities as revealed by crude, unsubtle acting leads to artless shock-tragedy that will either validate or infuriate the viewer, depending on the values and knowledge each one brings to the film. A failure that’s interesting for its tonal and visual ineptitudes, but a failure all the same, even though it’s a story that’s worth telling in harshly unapologetic terms, inspired by the real-life 2006 Mahmudiyah war crimes. Executive produced by Mark Cuban.

30/100