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| Movie Poster: Redacted |
Like an old, black-and-white World War II drama, "Redacted" presents the soldiers as a collection of types. Private Salazar (Izzy Diaz) is wiry and ambitious. He keeps a video diary in hopes of using it to get into film school when he gets out of the Army. Specialist B.B. Rush (Daniel Stewart Sherman) is the big dumb white guy. Private Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll) is the bad seed; his name says it all. Private Gabe Blix (Kel O'Neill) wears glasses, reads books, and works with a bomb-sniffing dog—obviously he's the sensitive one. Private Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney) is the handsome, all-American boy with a conscience. If this film had been made in the 1940s, Tyrone Power would have played McCoy. An advantage of using unknown actors is that they may seem, in their rawness, more like real soldiers, but none of these actors have developed the chops to breathe life into the stereotypes the script sketches for them.
"Redacted" runs only 90 minutes, and it seems unfinished. It spends little time on the repercussions of the rape and murders. Soldiers are grilled by their superiors, but no decisive legal action is taken. We're not even shown if there was a cover up. An investigation is initiated, but we're left to assume that it goes nowhere. For that reason the title of the film is a puzzling. Did scenes of redacted testimony and of senior officers sweeping the mess under the carpet end up on the cutting room floor?
The film jumps forward in time and space from the initial phases of the investigation to a bar back home as one of the soldiers, reunited with his wife and friends, celebrates his return. The crime still haunts him; he just can't let it go. His emotional scars will probably never heal. A slideshow of authentic photographs from the war provides a coda to the film, but, while visually powerful, it's a poor excuse for a resolution to the drama. Most films need cutting; "Redacted" needs more.
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