Throughout the film, the viewpoint switches between the POWs at Cabanatuan, the Rangers, the Filipino resistance and the Japanese.[citation needed]
The film covers the resistance work undertaken by nurse Margaret Utinsky, who smuggled medicine into the POW camps. The Kempeitai arrested her and sent her to Fort Santiago prison. She was eventually released but spent six weeks recovering from gangrene as a result of injuries sustained from beatings.[citation needed] The movie ends with the prisoners being liberated.
The Americans used a Northrop P-61 Black Widow night fighter to divert Japanese attention while the Rangers were crawling toward the camp; the aircraft used in the movie was a Lockheed Hudson, because none of the four surviving P-61s were airworthy when the film was made.[citation needed]
The movie was filmed in south-east Queensland, Australia utilising a huge, authentic recreation of a prisoner of war camp. In addition, numerous local Asian students were employed to play Japanese soldiers.[citation needed]
The movie was shot in 2002 but it was pulled from its original 2003 release schedule on several occasions. It was finally released in August 2005, by Miramax Films, which coincided with the formal departure of co-founders Bob and Harvey Weinstein from the company.[citation needed]
James Franco wrote about the making of the movie in his novel Actors Anonymous.[citation needed]
Reception
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 38% of 121 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 5.3/10. The website's consensus reads: "Though the climax of the film -- the actual raid -- is exciting, the rest of it is bogged down in too many subplots and runs on for too long."[2]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 48 out of 100, based on 29 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.[3]
Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe criticized a lack of character development and the pace of the film, saying, "On screen, at least, the raid to free the prisoners isn't all that great – just a bunch of explosions and combat maneuvers. Still, it's the one sequence in the film where everybody works with the same conviction. The audience, meanwhile, has to sit around with the prisoners, waiting for this to happen. It's a long wait."[4] He concluded that the film "amounts to a noble failure."[4] Mike Clark of USA Today said, "Just about any golden age Hollywood hack could have made a zestier drama about one of the greatest rescue missions in U.S. military history," and criticized "Franco's droning voice-over" for spelling out "every sliver of historical context", and also said "a huge chunk of time is given to an uncompelling romance between a major...and a widowed nurse."[5]Roger Ebert, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times gave it three stars, saying: "Here is a war movie that understands how wars are actually fought... [The film] has been made with the confidence that the story itself is the point, not the flashy graphics."[6]
Box office
The Great Raid underperformed at the box-office, grossing $10.2million in the United States and Canada, and $0.6million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $10.8million, against a budget of $80million.[7]