Canadian movie Hyena Road delivers realistic take on complicated war

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This article was published 08/10/2015 (3671 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Good intentions do not make good movies.

That should have been the takeaway from Paul Gross’s 2008 movie Passchendaele, an unapologetically Canadian war movie made with the intention of showing how Canada came of age as a nation by coming through the slaughterhouse of the First World War.

The film’s main strength was its unblinking gaze at the horrors of combat. Its overwhelming fault was its clumsily layered romantic subplot — that, and a script that aimed for poetry and fell disastrously short of the mark.

With Hyena Road, Gross is once again at the helm of a Canadian war movie, and while the landscape has changed — it’s a contemporary story set in the Canadian mission in Afghanistan — the Passchendaele character dynamics are still in play.

Yes, here’s an older, wiser military vet helping out an impressionable younger soldier. Yes, dismayingly, here too is a romantic subplot, this time involving a female captain who has fraternized with the younger soldier.

Gross casts himself as intelligence officer Pete Mitchell, a guy whose attitude towards the Afghanistan mission is primarily one of philosophical detachment. He knows the Canadian military’s war on the Taliban must factor in centuries of tribal history, including allegiances and enmities that predate Islam.

Gross occasionally makes Pete a narrator to deliver this background, a device that may seem a little hoary, except that it works both as exposition and in defining Pete’s character. (A lot of military guys, intelligence officers in particular, are serious students of history.)

Pete’s radar goes up when a sniper team led by Ryan Sanders (Rossif Sutherland) have their lives saved by a mysterious Afghan elder (Niamatullah Arghandabi) with different-coloured eyes. Pete believes this man to be a legendary mujahedeen warrior known as “the Ghost,” and employs Sanders to help track him down, in the hopes of winning a valuable ally.

For his part, Sanders is very much a typical young western soldier who believes he can make a difference “with a single shot.” His own personal stake in survival is raised as he is engaged in a hot-and-heavy but ill-advised romantic relationship with Capt. Jennifer Bowman (Christine Horne).

The subplot is not only extraneous, it’s actually a little damaging to women who serve in the military, given Bowman’s inability to separate her personal life from her professional duties.

That aside, Hyena Road still manages to impress with its considered and, I daresay, Canadian approach to the war movie. As a director, Gross tries to achieve some sense of realism in depicting the by-the-numbers procedures of military action. More importantly, the film’s view of Afghanistan is refreshingly textured compared to the American war movie, which tends to disregard the socio-political intricacies of “enemy territory.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca