Wilson, as Lieutenant Chris "Longhorn" Burnett, is a Navy navigator biding his time on the U.S.S. Carl Vinson, a carrier stationed in Bosnian waters; he's bored and cynical, waiting out a war that's winding down -- a battle he insists he doesn't understand. (Although we're never told when the film is set, it takes place while the U.N. is brokering something called the "Cincinnati Peace Treaty," a possible reference to 1995's Dayton Peace Agreement.) Burnett figures he's just a cop walking a beat no one cares about, and Wilson does him pitch-perfect -- as a restless smartass, a young man only playing the role of gruff and weary veteran. "Everybody thinks they're gonna get the chance to punch a Nazi in the face at Normandy," he whines to his pilot, Lieutenant Stackhouse (Gabriel Macht). "Those days are long over." Burnett has given Admiral Reigart (Hackman), the quintessential military man whose by-the-book bluster masks softhearted mush, his letter of resignation, due to take effect in two weeks. After that, he figures, he'll go fly Britney Spears around in her private plane.
While on a holiday mission, Burnett finally gets his shot at playing soldier when a reconnaissance mission is horribly botched: He and Stackhouse spy Serb soldiers up to no good, and when they go in to snap digital pics, they're brought down by pesky, relentless missiles. (Behind Enemy Lines, with its myriad digital, animated and miniature effects, isn't deficient in the dazzle department; it's like a virtual-reality version of Microsoft's Combat Flight Simulator.) Though Stackhouse is executed by uniformed Serb soldiers, the U.N., as represented by Admiral Piquet (Joaquim de Almeida), is loath to send in rescue troops; to do so would risk destroying the tenuous ceasefire. Why, Piquet wonders, would he risk thousands of lives for one U.S. soldier? "Americans," he snorts. "All you care about is your damned pilots."
And so Burnett is left to gambol through the bombed-out forests and factories, dodging bullets and mortars and landmines like an armed forces X-Man; in an instant, the wannabe soldier is transformed into James Bond and Indiana Jones, an indestructible superhero in olive drab. Surprisingly, the laconic star of Bottle Rocket and Shanghai Noon makes for a genial action figure -- indeed, it's his down-home affability that keeps the film from sinking into the cliche quagmire. But the film's politics, such as they are, and its razzle-dazzle effects (we see, for instance, the rippling effects of a bomb at the precise moment it's detonated -- a pale facsimile of Three Kings' bullet-cam gag) are mere distractions. They serve as gimmicks meant to divert our attention from the fact that it's just a cat-and-mouse movie without substance or surprise.
Throughout the film, Burnett is followed by a super-chic sniper (Vladimir Mashkov, referred to in the credits solely as "Tracker") decked out in a Clooney 'do and a warmup jacket. Been there, done that already this year, in the furious, flawed Enemy at the Gates, which at least had Ed Harris going for it.
The film's final third is so hyperbolic it's laughable: Once more, a novice director (commercial-maker John Moore) retraces John Woo's signature like an emotionless forger. (And perhaps the Three Kings comparisons aren't so accidental: A Bosnian kid who aids Burnett sports an Ice Cube T-shirt.)
Surely at some point during the filming of Behind Enemy Lines, Hackman had to feel like he was retracing old footsteps in military-issue combat boots. After all, in 1983's Uncommon Valor, he was a colonel leading a ragtag bunch of vets through the Vietnam jungles in search of a son gone missing in action; five years later, in Bat*21, it was he who was shot down and stranded in 'Nam, awaiting a rescue that felt as though it would never arrive. Behind Enemy Lines merges the two and then some. But remaking his own films has become de rigueur for Hackman. (What was 1998's Enemy of the State, if not a veiled sequel to Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 The Conversation?) Wilson's portrayal notwithstanding, Behind Enemy Lines has the smell of last week's leftovers all over it.
