Rescue Dawn: Critic Reviews

But just as exciting -- maybe even more so, for those who love the medium and, especially, the uplift of the great-escape genre -- Rescue Dawn is a triumphant Werner Herzog movie.

A satisfying genre picture that challenges the viewer's expectations.

An effective, unassuming and old-fashioned action adventure which is - perhaps a little faute de mieux - probably the best film of the week.

As prison-break movies go, Rescue ranks among the best.

That such a masterful depiction of American heroism and can-do spirit has been created by a German art film director known for considerably darker visions of obsession is an irony Herzog no doubt finds delicious.

Those coming to Rescue Dawn cold will probably accept it as a straightforward, even predictable account of POW suffering, and they'll hang on Bale's muscular portrayal of a man who refuses to say die.

As conventionally framed and lit as it is, Rescue Dawn is the closest thing to a 'real' movie that Herzog has ever made.

Problematic is Herzog's wildly romanticized view of his protagonist. No matter what tortures he faces, Dieter never has a moment of vulnerability. He's not a man, he's a superhero.

Rescue Dawn avoids all the land mines inherent in most war movies. There's no hero worship; no noisy, confusing, special-effects-enhanced battle scene.

That heart-stopping beginning tells us Herzog is again in top form, richly depicting the true story of the only American POW known to have escaped from Laotian captivity.

The film, Rescue Dawn, is so good it makes you wish that [director Werner] Herzog had gone Hollywood earlier in his career.

[Rescue Dawn] offers its own vision of deprivation but doesn't linger long enough, even mid-jungle, to leave us in the kind of directionless trance that was conjured by Aguirre and Every Man for Himself.

Herzog makes no attempt to pump this story up into a thrilling adventure. There is nothing thrilling about dysentery, starvation, insect bites and despair.

Its tone is reflective, not combative, and it operates on a lulling rhythm, so that the jungles become either mesmerizing or a narcotic, depending on your blood sugar.

Like much of Herzog's work, it's essentially apolitical, focusing on a man at war with his environment -- and no one plunges into the foliage like he does.

If Rescue Dawn isn't about heroism, then it's about something deeper, more primitive: survival instinct.

Herzog shows all of this with a fresh, observant eye. While sadism is a staple of most POW movies, Herzog focuses on the punishing tedium and deprivation of confinement. And filming on location in Thailand gives the film a harshly sensual look.

Takes what could have been a mundane if well-made war story into something greater -- more harrowing, more hungry and more human.

... everything about Rescue Dawn feels real ...

A potentially commercial audience-pleaser that retains all of the characteristic Herzog complexity and nuance, Rescue Dawn is an electrifying action adventure that clamps your nerves with jaws of steel.

This polished, cleanly made pic still packs a wrenching emotional punch and, if backed by critics and auds, could earn more for Herzog than his last 10 features put together.

What a sweet collision is Rescue Dawn: the American psycho meets the German kook.

Perhaps if [director Herzog] had tossed in a few Chevys that transform into robots, the studio would have given him the cash to make Rescue Dawn definitive, instead of generic, which is the best he manages here.

Workmanlike and watchable, Rescue Dawn is nonetheless a disappointment in its depiction of a hero with plenty of scars but little depth or substance beyond an iron will.

Herzog builds this movie around another strong, eccentric performance from Bale, who is gaining a reputation for outsized talent and for downsized physicality.