During the Vietnam War, a girl was taken from her village by five American soldiers. The disaster was when four soldiers raped her, but the fifth refused, while tensions between him and the rest of the unit escalated in the meantime as firearms begin with Fit Cong's forces.
Michael J. Fox is a revelation as the mouse that roared, whilst the score, the direction, and the rest of the cast turn a risky film into a solid addition to the Nam canon.
Speaking to our near-masochistic desire to revisit works in the hope that we can reverse the tragic outcome, Casualties of War perhaps transcends the very label of "war film."
A powerful metaphor of the national shame that was America's orgy of destruction in Vietnam, Brian De Palma's film deals directly with the harrowing rape and murder of a Vietnamese woman by four GIs.
It is a breakthrough work, a signal of an artist's blossoming maturity, and one of the most punishing, morally complex movies about men at war ever made.
Mr. Penn plays Meserve with terrific elan. There is plausibility in every movement and gesture, and especially in his crafty handsomeness. His Meserve is the sort of man one credits with thoughts when the mind may, in fact, be completely blank.
Washington Post
January 01, 2000
Another Brian De Palma movie, another bludgeoning. Or stabbing. Or body-drilling. Whatever -- as long as the victim's a woman.
