KEY POINTS:
Herald rating: * * *
The most un-Herzog-like Werner Herzog film you're likely to see, this based-on-fact Vietnam War drama is very classy if rather standard stuff. But it is considerably enlivened by the always engaging presence of Christian Bale as a US pilot shot down over Laos in 1966.
For 40 years, Herzog's films have brought us some of cinema's most striking characters - whether fictional (Woyzeck), real (Grizzly Man's Timothy Treadwell) or tantalisingly unclassifiable mixtures of the two (Kaspar Hauser, Fitzcarraldo). Beside these figures, Dieter Dengler, whose story this is, is the most ordinary bloke ever to attract the film-maker's attention.
The director told Dengler's story 10 years ago in Little Dieter Learns to Fly, a documentary in which the veteran relived his experiences as a prisoner of the Pathet Lao and then the North Vietnamese.
Here Bale, whose performance has enough energy to power a small city, holds together a pounding, full-throttle adventure story of a man who inspires his psychologically defeated fellow prisoners to undertake the most daring escape.
There are flashes of Herzog's visual bravura in the hellishly beautiful bombing raids, and Dengler's crash is, by any standards, spectacular - viscerally realistic rather than computer-generated overkill. But the film's spare, unadorned narrative style may leave fans of the maestro hungry. Even the brilliantly loopy turn from Davies as a gaunt and resigned wreck of a POW is not enough to lift this into the kind of work the film-maker has led us to expect - but it is a long way above the Hollywood standard.
Cast: Christian Bale, Steve Zahn, Franois Chau, Jeremy Davies
Director: Werner Herzog
Running time: 126 minutes
Rating: M, contains violence and offensive language
Screening: SkyCity, Rialto
Verdict: High-octane performance from Bale as a POW pilot but fans of Herzog the maestro may feel short-changed.
