Gimmicks turn an all-American hero into a screen zero

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (15) Verdict: A good movie, spoiled

ANG LEE is a hugely accomplished director who has made some very good films (Life Of Pi, Brokeback Mountain, Sense And Sensibility).

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is not one of them. And it’s not as if Lee can blame anyone but himself, for he has chosen a gimmicky form of presentation that cheapens, rather than enhances, the story — of a U.S. war hero returning in 2004 from Iraq, with his platoon, to be feted at a Dallas Cowboys football game.

This is a great shame, because the film has plenty of interesting things to say about the nature of military heroism and how it is regarded back home.

Billy (splendidly played by British actor Joe Alwyn, below) risked his life trying, under heavy fire, to save his sergeant (Vin Diesel). His heroics were filmed on a phone, so his reputation precedes him back to his native Texas, where he and his band of brothers are to be honoured. Not only that, but the Cowboys owner (Steve Martin) might want to make a film about them.

But Billy is conflicted. His sister (Kristen Stewart) is pressuring him not to go back to the front line, and in any case he doesn’t really feel like a hero. To compound all that, the pushy stage manager at the Cowboys game is treating the men like circus freaks, trying to fit them around the other attraction, Destiny’s Child.

With muscle-bound security guards keen to pick a fight with them, and Martin’s smoothtalking mogul unwilling to reward them properly for their contribution to his film, Billy and his commander (Garrett Hedlund) come to realise they might be better off back in a dusty foxhole than in this commercial hellhole.

All of which offers food for thought, but it is made unpalatable by Lee’s decision to shoot his film with what’s known as a high-frame rate, imbuing it with the artificial sheen of a promotional video.

That, along with endless close-ups, ruin what, with a more conventional approach, could have been an intriguing picture.