The Great Raid Critic Reviews

The Great Raid amounts to a noble failure. This is sad news for those of us who remain hopelessly partial to Dahl's mean streak. The failure we can live with. It's the noble part that will never do.Read the full review

The Great Raid is perhaps more timely now than it would have been a few years ago, when "smart bombs" and a couple of weeks of warfare were supposed to solve the Iraq situation. Now that we are involved in a lengthy and bloody ground war there, it is good to have a film that is not about entertainment for action fans, but about how wars are won with great difficulty, risk, and cost.Read the full review

The main problem? Raid lacks a center. It's an exhausted sprawl with multiple story foci, none of them terribly compelling.Read the full review

A plodding, squeaky-straight Time-Life tribute to the greatest generation, the movie plays like a commemorative plaque.Read the full review

The rousing success of the final 45 minutes cannot entirely counterbalance the stumbling uncertainty of the first 90 minutes.Read the full review

The Great Raid tells its story without irony, perspective or any leavening that would make it something other than an ordinary military-action caper.Read the full review

The film brings a spectacular but little-known chapter of World War II to the big screen with meticulous attention to period detail -- and almost none to compelling narrative.Read the full review

A tedious World War II epic that slogs across the screen like a forced march in quicksand.Read the full review

A lumbering, disappointingly bland war movie.Read the full review