Ambush (2023)

George Santayana said, “Only the dead have seen the end of war” — or, I might add, the end of retarded Vietnam war movies like Ambush (or last year’s The Greatest Beer Run Ever). This film is so clueless that it has a character called “Mora” and another one called “Mera;” then again, even the characters that don’t have pretty much homonymous are nonetheless pretty much interchangeable. The movie’s title itself makes zero fucking sense, unless of course it refers to how they got Aaron Eckhart to appear in this piece of crap. Only some 20-25 years ago Eckhart was starring in thought-provoking dark comedies such as In the Company of Men and Thank You for Smoking; nowadays, however, he must thread carefully lest he finds himself deeper and deeper in Thomas Jane territory.

Eckhart doesn’t so much phone as he two-way radioes his performance as General Drummond. His role consists solely of spouting into a hand mic inane dialogue along the lines of “An intelligence binder [has] fallen into enemy hands. It has the names and locations of hundreds of Vietnamese operatives working with our military. As you can imagine, it’s imperative that their identities not fall into the Viet Cong. That binder must be retrieved and destroyed at any cost.”

As MacGuffins go, this “intelligence binder” is among the dumbest ever. First of all, the “enemy” and “the Viet Cong” are, in this context, kind of exactly the same fucking thing; that is to say, if the binder has already fallen into the hands of the enemy, “that [the Vietnamese operatives working with our military’s] identities not fall into the Viet Cong” is not so much imperative as it is moot. Second, the heroes retrieve the binder only to lose it again, and it makes no fucking difference whatsoever; wouldn’t the VC have already copied the shit out of the binder’s contents? They don’t even have to translate it, as the Americans must (for some reason, the information is in Vietnamese) — and indeed, leaving it with a translator is what causes it to be lost a second time (before that, Captain Mora (Gregory Sims) carelessly drops it in the mud for no good reason; all in all, the characters seem to care about this binder as much as the audience does).

And third, the bulk of the film takes place underground, as a bunch of young military engineers (!) have two hours to navigate a VC tunnel system and, once again, “retrieve or destroy that binder at all costs.” Why didn’t they just destroy it when they first had the chance? Not that, like I already stated, that would make a hell of a lot of difference. And why “two hours”? Well, because after two hours, “anything in that tunnel is dead” — but why exactly that span of time (and not more or less), or how they’re going to kill “anything in that tunnel” (including their own guys, which seems wasteful; doesn’t the Army need young military engineers?), is never really explained. All things considered, maybe the whole idea was to make a point about the stupidity of war; if that be truly the case, they certainly got the ‘stupid’ part down.

PS. This movie has the gall of ending with a captioned dedication “to the 58,220 brave men and women of the U.S. Military who gave their lives in the Vietnam War.” That’s a lotta bodies rolling over in their graves.