Saturday’s movie 2: Behind Enemy Lines

In the current highly charged environment, this film plays like a lit match in a tinderbox. Good but fed up American Navy pilot (the dreamy, I’m told, Owen Wilson) tires of playing cop on a beat where he isn’t wanted (Bosnia) nears the end of his hitch and turns in his resignation. Trying to teach him a lesson, the grumpy old admiral (Gene Hackman, who works a lot for a 71 year old) sends our boy on a Christmas recon mission. Sure enough, something goes wrong, the plane goes “off-mission,” gets shot down by some really good bad guys (Serbs trying to sneak a little genocide past a peace treaty), and the horse are off on a race. Joaquin de Almeda plays a Spanish NATO admiral who keeps getting in Hackman’s way. Wilson and Hackman play off each other on a series of radio conversations. Nicely done action sequences, I never felt like Wilson had to do something completely impossible to escape Serb bullets, and the radio conversations give good pause and punctuation to the ever more dangerous movement–good direction by John Moore in what is apparently his first time out. Strong action film, recommended.