A football game in the middle of a war sounds as high concept as movies get. And yet Peter Berg\u2019s Netflix epic \u201cThe Mosquito Bowl\u201d is based on a scrimmage that really happened in the Pacific theater during World War II, when two Marine regiments squared off on Guadalcanal Beach on Christmas Eve of 1944. It wasn\u2019t some amateur contest, either: Most of the players, in a curious fluke, were college stars with serious pro prospects. They\u2019d just need to stay alive to realize those dreams.<\/p>\n
Berg, a full-tilt kind of director whose love of combat scenarios and gridiron drama has elsewhere yielded his best films, \u201cLone Survivor\u201d<\/a> and \u201cFriday Night Lights,\u201d<\/a> was surely the guy to adapt this story, drawn from \u201cFriday\u201d author Buzz Bissinger\u2019s 2022 book. Except that in his admirable attempt to juxtapose a violent game against the hell of war, Berg has regrettably hewed to a standard playbook of tropes without sending fleshed-out characters onto the field.<\/p>\n Which is too bad, because the real-life athletes-turned-soldiers he and co-screenwriter Mark L. Smith have built their movie around have been well-cast with quartet of ascendant stars. Brooding hunk Nicholas Galitzine plays brainy, good-natured Brown graduate John McLaughry; Bill Skarsg\u00e5rd is wily-eyed Wisconsin Badger Bob Bauman; Tom Francis is All-American tight end Dave Schreiner, who can\u2019t get over his school having lost to Purdue; and record-breaking fullback Ray Butkovich is played with grinning confidence by Ray Nicholson (maybe you know his dad).<\/p>\n Introduced in muddy, crunchy scenes of big game highlights and raucous partying, the boys hear news of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Then it\u2019s quiet goodbyes to loved ones (one scene per lead) as they enter basic training, where a drill sergeant (played by football analyst Pat McAfee) whips them into killing shape. By the time they\u2019re at sea, it feels as if Berg, a supremely fidgety ringmaster, has engineered everything so far to be one big montage machine hurtling us toward the brutal reality of a sobering quote that opens the film: \u201cOlder men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.\u201d<\/p>\n You may be immune by now to the gory verisimilitude required of combat depiction since Spielberg supercharged it in \u201cSaving Private Ryan,\u201d but Berg demands newfound attention to its bloody, deafening chaos. These in-your-face sequences are a technical achievement, for sure, but also a stark reminder that we don\u2019t know the main characters very well beyond the broadest of strokes. There\u2019s even tacit acknowledgment that it was a meat grinder for the Japanese, too, and that sometimes, our men \u2014 shown realistically entering the war with a demonizing mindset \u2014 grasped that.<\/p>\n The real head-scratcher here, however, is that when the game finally arrives, it seems to fly by, another casualty of Berg\u2019s restless energy. An opportunity is lost for catharsis. Some of that feeling is there but it feels skimmed, not hard-won because of characterization or scene dynamics. I\u2019ve never been more ready for a football game to be cinematically stirring, and more disappointed that it amounted to a supercut.<\/p>\n ‘The Mosquito Bowl’<\/p>\n Rated: R, for intense sequences of graphic war violence, grisly images, and language throughout<\/p>\n Running time: 2 hours, 7 minutes<\/p>\n Playing: Opens Friday, Oct. 30 in limited release<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A football game in the middle of a war sounds as high concept as movies get. 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