Review: War Horse

Beginning just before WWI in Devonshire, we meet struggling farmer Peter Mullan, his wife Emily Watson, and son Jeremy Irvine as they struggle to pay landlord David Thewlis. Yes, the farm is in threat of foreclosure. Gee, haven’t heard that one before. One day, the ne’er-do-well Mullan decides to buy a horse at auction, much to the displeasure of Watson, though Irvine vows to find a use for the animal on the farm. A bond soon forms between boy and horse, the latter now named Joey. Unfortunately, once the war breaks out, their union is broken in the name of Britain, as Joey is rounded up, and poor Irvine is too young to fight in the war. Joey is then in the care of kindly army Captain Tom Hiddleston, whilst Irvine is back at home hoping to one day ride him again. Or something like that. Benedict Crumblebum...er...Cumberbatch plays another officer, as do Eddie Marsan and Liam Cunningham, whilst Niels Arestrup is a French grandfather whose granddaughter takes in the horse at one point.

 

Steven Spielberg has been responsible for some of the greatest entertainments in cinematic history; “Jaws”, “ET”, and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” alone are cinematic milestones as far as I’m concerned. And yet in 2011, the man went 0-2 with two deathly dull and old-fashioned films, the animated “The Adventures of Tintin”, and now this hoary old thing. Has Mr. Blockbuster lost his touch? Well, both films were popular at the box-office and most critics, but in my opinion, yes Spielberg has indeed lost his touch. In fact, this one’s even worse than “Tintin”. About the only good thing I can say about it is that at least the horses are real, unlike the pathetic stage version. Those horse puppets just look absurd, though I’m not a regular theatre-goer anyway.

 

The first part of the film is unendurably twee potato farmer crap, kind of like “Lassie” with a horse. I kept waiting for the horribly disfigured Leprechaun to turn up and club everyone’s kneecaps. And why is Bilbo now played by Peter Mullen? Not even a mutton-chopped David Thewlis could save this (he’s good, though), certainly not the dull Jeremy Irvine, and Emily Watson is surprisingly terrible playing a one-dimensional weepie cliché that seemed more like a parody of a stereotype to me (Mullen isn’t much better). She also gets one extremely unglamorous close-up that really did remind me of a sack of potatoes. Why would you do that to the poor woman, Steven? Meanwhile, every time Irvine opens his mouth in this, all I could hear was Samwise Gamgee, and believe me, Sean Astin’s Irish accent wasn’t exactly stellar. A real Irishman might’ve made something a lot less twee than this (not that this was set in Ireland. It’s actually set in England, but someone forgot to tell Spielberg and the actors this, it seems), but Spielberg completely botches it. I get the boy and his horse connection for Spielberg (though Irvine’s odd performance will give you “Equus”-inspired nightmares), but I liked this a whole lot better when the horse was an alien who made Drew Barrymore scream.

 

After that opening section, one realises this film is going to be an episodic film where the horse is actually the main character, travelling from owner to owner like an equine Forrest Gump crossed with Simpson and his Donkey (a WWI Australian story that has become legend). And boy is that a stupid idea, though I should confess at this point that I hate horses and don’t much care for British farm life stories, either. This isn’t a timeless story, it’s an antiquated one, and boring beyond belief. The opening 40 minutes felt like two hours at least. Tom Hiddleston gives an excellent performance in a rare good guy role, but this film took way too long to go nowhere interesting. It’s full of clichés and nothing about it is remotely subtle, including one of the least impressive music scores by John Williams (“Jaws”, “Star Wars”, “Superman”, “Raiders of the Lost Ark”), who ought to be embarrassed by his work here. Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (“Schindler’s List”, “Saving Private Ryan”, “Minority Report”) continue the heavy-handedness of the film by framing the Germans in ominous shadows and shot compositions that are a teeny bit racist (And don’t get me started on that wannabe “Gone With the Wind” finale. What the hell was that?). If it were a WWII film, I could almost forgive such a thing, but WWI? Not so much. And then there’s the scene where the horse volunteers to get a harness put on it. Yes, the horse is an enlisted man, folks. Corny as fuck. So clichéd was it, that when Benedict Cumberbatch and his ridiculously pompous voice came along as a stiff upper-lipped Brit officer I kept wondering when he was going to order the horse to go marching UP and DOWN the SQUARE! He’s a boring and silly actor and it’s a really bad sign in a drama when you’re thinking about Monty Python, folks because those sketches are what, 40-50 years old at least now? I know this is a WWI-set film, but there’s a difference between being set in the past and being antiquated.

 

I know a lot of people liked this film, but I found it useless. Horses to me have zero personality and have no right being the main protagonist of a film unless it’s a movie version of “Mr. Ed”. That might be fun. Loved that damn show. Spielberg even botches the few spots of CGI in the film, as horses gallop past gunfire. The CGI was obviously necessary, but it’s definitely not top-shelf stuff, though thankfully only briefly used.

 

I said earlier that the film is episodic, but if not, then it’s extremely unfocussed because you simply cannot expect us to be invested in a film where the horse is the character we’re meant to relate to. You need humans to latch on to, in order to get around the horse’s lack of charisma (Look at the classic “The Yearling”, about a boy and his deer, but the deer wasn’t a camera hog, the boy was the main character). I don’t care what the title says, a horse should not be the main character. One horse looks the same as the next if it’s the same colour, for starters (And there were 14 ‘Joeys’ used in the film, to further prove my point). I literally got confused between horses at certain points. The same cannot be said of humans, unless you’re ignorant, and it meant that a supposedly sad moment between two horses was rendered ineffective for me because I couldn’t identify either of them.

 

I’m sorry, but there’s nowhere near 2 ½ hours worth of material in this nonsense, and it’s C-grade radio serial material at best. It’s an extended Guinness commercial, more like it. Despite my hating the potato farmer crap, the film would’ve at least been tighter if it had focused on the scenes in Ireland, and moved to the scenes with Hiddleston, and then returned to the farm scenes again. Instead we get an extended and seriously dull pit stop in France for God knows what reason.

 

The dirty battle scenes, when we get to them are well-done and mostly free of shaky-cam, but when it takes 90 minutes to get to the good stuff, and that 90 minutes has been unendurable crap, it’s just not good enough. Maybe they should’ve started the film during the war and have the kid and horse introduced to each other there and forgotten all the potato farmer crap and Emily Watson’s unflattering face. There are way too many close-ups in this, especially those given to the horse. Yes, the horse. Horses are no more expressive than Bruce the Shark, and he was mechanical for Christ’s sake, Steven! I couldn’t get over how heavy-handed the camerawork was here in purely dramatic scenes. The finale (the “Gone With the Wind” thing I referred to earlier) is so schmaltzy I nearly vomited. And I normally love schmaltz.

 

Horse lovers will enjoy this, no doubt about it. I hated it. It was well-mounted but interminably and insufferably twee, and completely heavy-handed to boot. Adapted from Michael Morpurgo’s novel by Lee Hall and the normally very fine Richard Curtis (the latter being the director of the very fine “Love Actually” and the underrated “Boat That Rocked”), this may very well be the worst Best Picture Oscar nominee of all-time, in a year full of underwhelming Oscar nominees. But hey, everyone else loves this film (and the play won a Tony Award to boot), so what do I know? I’m just the guy who didn’t like “Red Dog”, and hated this one even more.

 

Rating: D-