'Kwai'-like war film rigid in its inspiration

Editor's note: "To End All Wars" was filmed on Kaua'i in 2000.

By Kevin Thomas
Los Angeles Times

•	'To End All Wars' R, for warfare and for crude language 117 minutes

There's potentially a much stronger film in the memoirs of Ernest Gordon, a survivor of the Chungkai camp in the Burma-Siam jungle, but the adapter, Brian Godawa, and director David L. Cunningham take a relentlessly straight-on, by-the-book approach to a story rich in possibilities for complexity and irony. The result is ultimately more grueling than rewarding.

Gordon (Cier‡n McMenamin), a young Scottish captain, is among a small group of Allied soldiers captured in 1942 after the Japanese invasion of Singapore. In his group are defiant Maj. Ian Campbell (Robert Carlyle) and Lt. Jim Reardon (Kiefer Sutherland), a cynical Yank. The Japanese military officers in charge of the camp are fanatic emperor worshippers who see their prisoners as inferiors to be treated savagely for the slightest infraction.

Those who resist merely make everything worse, especially with the advent of the arduous construction of the "railway of death," intended as a supply line for the invasion of India. Supported by the deeply spiritual Dusty Miller (Mark Strong), Gordon establishes an informal Jungle University to raise the morale of his fellow POWs, which in turn sparks a spiritual awakening throughout the camp that Campbell regards as a threat to his dream of escape.

The notion that a fellow prisoner could be a greater enemy than one's casually sadistic captors is chilling and worthy of further development than it gets here.