The Doings
Co-writer and co-director Johnny Strong plays Master Chief Richard Mirko; leader of a frogman team whose chopper (call sign “Warhorse One”) is hit by a rocket while inbound to rescue a group of missionaries from encroaching Taliban insurgents.Mirko falls out the helicopter door and through a bunch of pine trees that break his fall enough to save his life but also knock him senseless. When he comes to, the film spends way too much time on war-fighter-moving-out prep stuff: comms check, gear check, ammo check, and so on. There’s like five minutes of this, and all such subsequent check-this-and-check-that things linger way too long to keep one’s attention.
Then, instead of obeying mission orders and tracking the missionary family trying to make a getaway in their Isuzu Trooper, he first avenges his fallen SEAL brothers and kills the group of Taliban fighters who blew his chopper out of the sky. At one point, he steals the jump-into-the-river-from-a-cliff escape straight out of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
Athena Durner plays 5-year-old Zoe who’s in need of constant shepherding to the constantly delayed exfil site. When Mirko finds the missionary family, only this little girl has survived. She should be in danger-level shock due to the trauma of seeing her family shot dead in front of her, but apart from some denial about her mother “sleeping,” she’s remarkably and completely unrealistically unaffected; smiling occasionally at the beauty of nature and such. Sure, she’ll catch a massively debilitating case of PTSD in the near future, but there needed to be more catatonia and less functionality for any of this to initiate suspension of disbelief.
Not a Lot to Work With
Both roles are exceptionally scanty, which is why, generally speaking, actual writers should do the writing, actual directors should direct, and actual actors should just act. But actors who heap all these things on their own plate are either: 1) overconfident, 2) just trying to get some decent work in Hollywood, or 3) a mega talent on the level of Mel Gibson with “Braveheart.”
Strong’s been a working actor since the mid-'90s, most famously in a bit part in “Black Hawk Down,” and you can’t fault him for giving it his all in an attempt to get noticed and drum up more business in Hollywood. It’s a valiant attempt that few have the ambition to pull off. To have enough clout to successfully manage to get a major motion picture to the big screen is a big deal, in and of itself, but Johnny Strong is no Mel Gibson. Even though he went so far as to compose the movie’s score himself.
Most of the movie has Mirko firing his M4A1 carbine out of frame at Taliban, who do the same with their AKs, ad nauseum. Likewise grating is the fact that the dialogue recording is blatantly unbalanced: You can’t hear what’s being said, which is especially true in the case of Strong’s character. When speaking on comms to the “head shed” and apparently saying important things, he’s completely unintelligible.
The Kid
Athena Durner is excellent casting and almost saves the movie by her small self. She’s got a lot going on, and manages to be able to look defiant and adorable at the same time. It was a dangerous move on Strong’s part to choose to share so much screen time with a child actor. Children, like animals, naturally carry an inner stillness that can’t be taught (or which can be painstakingly learned by actors, via 10,000 hours of practice). That inner stillness translates to being so impeccably in the moment that they themselves don’t know what’s coming next. Which is largely what charisma consists of. Which is why children are so inherently riveting.
If, during the scenes where Mirko attempts to answer her questions regarding war and dying (clearly written to give the script some philosophical heft), he was able to match Zoe’s inner stillness, it might have provided a bit of movie pith.
As is, though, “Warhorse One “ is overlong and over-edited. I mentioned that Strong wrote the score. Did I mention he worked on the coloring as well? Too many cooks, no matter how skilled, can spoil the soup. This is more of a case of one cook trying to cook too many soups.
