★☆☆☆☆
Renny Harlin’s film combines the worst elements of Hollywood action-movie cliches along with a substanceless explanation of the events themselves.
There’s so much wrong with Renny Harlin’s 2011 film about the August 2008 War – entitled 5 Days of War — it’s hard to even know where to begin.
But, of course, neither does the movie, which starts with an odd and out-of-place scene in Iraq when the film’s star — Thomas Anders, a two dimensional trope of a grizzled war journalist played by Rupert Friend — is rescued from faceless jihadis by heroic Georgian soldiers.
Relying on tired action movie tropes and clearly biased depictions of the brave Georgian warriors, it feels like propaganda right off the bat.
And, of course, that’s because it is.
On its face, without being familiar with the politics of the region, it is perplexing why the movie was even made, and how it managed to get relatively big names — such as Val Kilmer, Andy Garcia, and Heather Graham — to feature in it.
5 Days of War was in part financed by members of Georgia’s former ruling United National Movement (UNM) party, which was in power both at the time that the war occurred and when the film was released, and which had a stake in presenting its own narrative about the conflict to the West.
It is no surprise that the movie has zero nuance in its black-and-white depiction of Georgia, the good, against Russia, the evil, and of then-President Mikheil Saakashvili (played by Garcia in a thankless role) as an unequivocally heroic figure, ignoring his many controversies.
Ironically, some of the most overtly propagandistic elements of the film are also some of the only parts that ring true today, against the backdrop of Russia’s brutal full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Early on in the movie, Anders, who airdrops into Georgia ahead of the outbreak of fighting, struggles with Western indifference to what is happening, and is baffled that Western media uncritically repeats Russian propaganda and talking points from then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Many have argued that the West’s tepid response to Russia’s aggression against Georgia paved the way for Moscow to do the same in Ukraine, first in 2014 and then again in 2022.
Besides this extremely brief foray into actually making a good point, the film’s explanation of the real-world events surrounding the war is delivered in a 20-second exposition dump by Anders, the American journalist.
Keeping in line with the superficial nature of the movie, the description of the circumstances that lead to the outbreak of fighting contains about zero nuance.
It’s not just that the film failed as a propaganda piece — its cartoonishly evil stereotypical Russian villains (or ‘Cossacks’ for that matter) felt straight out of the Red Scare era of the 1950s — it’s also just a straight up bad movie.
The bulk follows Anders and his fellow foreign journalists, who in classic Hollywood-style get to be the heroes of the story, overshadowing the Georgian characters.
The film launches into the conflict quickly, with Russian forces bombing the scene of a festive Georgian wedding, and Anders rescuing a local woman, Tatia, played by the very non-Georgian actress Emannuelle Chriqui.
For some reason, almost all of the Georgian and Russian characters are played by non-Georgian and Russian actors. When they speak in English, which they mercifully do more than struggling to speak Georgian or Russian, they use the standard Russian-type movie accent that bears little resemblance to the one that actual Georgians or Russians often have. This includes Saakashvili and his team, which are inexplicably played by American and British actors, speaking in English to each other but occasionally saying a few words in horribly accented Georgian. It all makes for a confusing and rather irritating approach, and leads to numerous scenes in which the screenwriters clearly use deus ex machina plot devices to spare the actors (and the audience) from using Georgian or Russian.
The language issue is really symbolic of one of the biggest issues with the movie — for a film about a war between Russia and Georgia, there are almost no Russian or Georgian actors in it, or at least none with actual speaking roles. Even as characters, the American and British journalists take centre stage, alongside the extremely Americanised Tatia, who explains her complete lack of an accent by saying she studied in the US.
The remainder of the film follows Anders and his team as they race to get footage of Russian war crimes to Western media, borrowing a bizarre trope from other films in which there is a belief the West would actually do something about foreign conflicts if they knew atrocities were being committed (Behind Enemy Lines anyone?).
I won’t spoil the plot, but needless to say there’s plenty of last-minute rescues, severed limbs and spurting blood, missiles being fired into buildings, and cool guys not looking at explosion moments. It’s all very trite and predictable.
Surprisingly, the movie concludes with an actual, real moment of pathos, with a series of clips of Georgians speaking about how their loved ones were killed during the war. It provides some real-world grounding to what is otherwise an utterly awful film, but also almost feels cheap tacked on to the very end of the shoot-em up spectacle.
Film details: 5 Days of War (2011), directed by Renny Harlin, is available to stream on YouTube, Apple TV, and Amazon Prime.
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