One Paragraph Movie Review: The Big Red One

Forty-first film: The Big Red One, a 1980 war epic co-starring a busy Mark Hamill in the same year The Empire Strikes Back came out. The bad bits: you can’t understand a single word that infantry leader Lee Marvin says, but his cragginess and rogue eyebrows say enough; the music is hopelessly mismatched to each scene and would be just as effectively replaced by kazoo; and the fact that two of the main characters are from Revenge Of The Nerds and Grease is super-distracting. The good bits: thanks to Mark Hamill you get a lot of good opportunities to shout “USE THE FORCE LUKE!”, there are a few admittedly tragic but still OMG-worthy twists, and at one point Lee Marvin whispers “pousser” — the French word for “push” — to a pregnant refugee. Worth a look. Two and three-quarter symbolic beachside wristwatches out of five.