The Outpost tells the true story of heroic soldiers stationed in an outpost in Afghanistan. Despite the fact the place is a logistical nightmare and nearly impossible to defend, the grunts stick to their mission of easing tensions with the locals. When the Taliban finally attacks, the soldiers rise to the occasion and fight back against unbeatable odds to hold their position.
On the surface, The Outpost looks like it’s going to be one of those generic DTV war movies that your grandfather would watch. I was a bit worried in the beginning as the character introductions were done in the form of title cards with their names on it. I usually hate this form of shorthand, but it made sense since there are so many characters on the base, and it’s a little hard to keep track of everyone.
I was also concerned by the fact that the cast was mostly comprised of sons of much better-known actors. The offspring of Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson, and Mick Jagger are in this movie, which was enough to make me kind of wish their respective fathers had made a similar film together forty years earlier. We even get the grandsons of Richard Attenborough and Alan Alda in there as well. This rampant nepotism gave me the feeling this was going to be a modern-day version of those old DTV action movies in which sons and brothers of more famous movie stars were passed off as real actors. I mean the biggest name in the cast is The Lord of the Rings’ Orlando Bloom, who gets the “And” billing on the poster, so you can probably guess what happens to him early on.
The first half is kind of ambling and episodic, which didn’t do much for my confidence. Also, the ham-fisted dialogue like, “We can’t argue and fight” that’s supposed to be profound, comes off as clunky. Once the proverbial shit hits the fan, the movie, like the soldiers it honors, digs deep and goes above and beyond the call of duty.
I guess I shouldn’t have doubted director Rod Lurie. I’m a big fan of The Last Castle and I appreciated his Straw Dogs remake more than most. Although the early sequences are a tad scattershot, he does a fine job at creating suspenseful battle sequences once the film goes all-in on the action. His “You are There” camerawork heightens the suspense without resorting to the typical shaky-cam stuff that ruins most movies. I can’t quite put it on the same pedestal as Saving Private Ryan, but there are certainly some harrowing moments that echo that classic.
Once the attack begins, the movie really kicks into overdrive. The characters who at this point were a bit interchangeable, come into focus. This is the kind of film I like where the characters are defined by their actions and not dialogue. The performances are all fine, with Scott Eastwood being a standout and delivering a bit of his old man’s squinty-eyed charm.
At its heart, The Outpost is a memorial to the men who served. Mostly though it plays like a modernized B war picture. I don’t mean that in a disrespectful way, either. I’m talking about the kind that Sam Fuller used to make (there’s even a character named “Griff”), when men were men, and the film was as tough as the soldiers it depicted. It’s fine tribute to the men that fell in battle while simultaneously being a compelling war movie.
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