The Forgotten (1989)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

I have always been astonished by the way the Americans can face their own history past and errors. This TV movie makes no exception to this rule. The screenwriters don't hesitate to talk about the CIA manipulating, using their own men; and there were batches of films speaking of this. I won't repeat the plot line, the other users have already done it, but I think somewhere of MANDCHURIAN CANDIDATE and - in some sequences of flash backs in POW camps - of DEER HUTER. In France, you won't see many films pointing out Algeria war and all "dirty affairs" the french government directed against Arab leaders and population and also OAS members;not speaking of its implication with the underworld, through the S.A.C organization. See for instance Ben Barka assassination affair. Only in 2005 a film was made about it, even if Yves Boisset gave us L'ATTENTAT in 1972. But that is another comment.

There's usually something a bit distasteful about movies which exploit the notion that American POWs were (and perhaps still are) being held in Vietnam after the end of American involvement there. This movie is no exception though it has a good cast and its earnest quality tends to soften the edges of its questionable material.And like most POW movies, this one feels compelled to include some torture scenes. In fact, there's a whole smorgasbord of them. We see Keith Carradine, stripped to the waist, tied in a chair where he's threatened with a gun and slapped around by an Vietnamese interrogator. Then we see Michael Champion's head pushed backward over a tub of water while a flowing water-hose is forced into his mouth. Next Richard Lawson gets bamboo shoved under his fingernails followed by Steven Railsback being whipped across his bare torso while hanging upside-down. It's as if the Vietnamese had a separate torture for each POW!(Apparently they forgot about the sack containing a hungry rat which was tied over Chuck Norris' head in "Missing in Action" or the electric generator whose wires were attached to David Anthony Smith's nipples in "The Hanoi Hilton." Watching Smith writhe in agony with each turn of the generator's crank while his tormentors giggled in delight is perhaps the ultimate in these scenes.)Most of the actors give a better effort than the script deserves but top honors go to William Lucking.

But the movie is still quite enjoyable. Some soldiers from Vietnam have just been released from being POWs, now they are back and safe, or are they? They are all questioned and interrogated about a secret mission which they are suspected of being involved in, it's a bit obvious what the mission was going to have involved but it kept me watching for the details. The acting was substantial, except for the German wife of one of the soldiers who had a bad accent saying 'z' instead of 'th' "Zey will kill zem".All in all it's okay as a tv movie but not up to theatrical standards they isn't a whole lot there it all runs along fine but it just could have done with more meat to it. Also the ending just makes me feel that they had run out of money(or ideas) and just had to end the film.