Be All You Can Be

Anyone seen Buffalo Soldiers? Just caught it the other night & it struck me as a sort of post-9/11 Stripes with humor blacker than the sole of a jackboot. Joaquin Phoenix plays Ray Elwood, a petty car thief given the choice of six months in the slammer or three years in the service. He picks the latter option and as chief supply clerk of an Army base in Stuttgart, Germany builds a black market empire from the ground up dealing in everything from contraband floor cleaner to custom-cooked smack. Boredom-laden days are spent driving his Mercedes on the Autobahn at speeds of 200+ mph and managing his various criminal cookie jars. Ed Harris plays his bumbling commanding officer- a Col. Hall to Phoenix’s Sgt. Bilko- who is oblivious to the skullduggery going on. Scott Glenn and Dean Stockwell also make supporting appearances as a sadistic sergeant and dilettante general respectively and Anna Paquin plays the love interest.

There’s repeated fixation on Army slogans & credos, on walls, stairs, posters, etc. juxtaposing a bit heavy-handedly the Armed Forces ideal with the corrupt reality that’s the film’s guiding plot premise. The first half is pretty entertaining. Various vignettes demonstrate the soldiers’ segregation into what Elwood eloquently calls “the motherfuckers” and “the motherfucked.” One scene in particular, where a tank crew, having just collectively shot up, pilots their tank through an Oktoberfest celebration, steamrolls a Volkswagen beetle and ends up demolishing a gas station with pyrotechnically fatal results before returning to their unit, had me cracking a guilty smile. Plot holes are prevalent and the whole thing falls apart into a nihilistic mess with the final act, but overall I thought it not bad. From what I gather it took a serious hit at the box office being released in the wake of Operation Iraqi Freedom. No one likes to have a hypothesized underbelly exposed when the body itself is embroiled in a very real conflict.