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As you no doubt know by now, the film chronicles the melodramatic and frankly sentimental tale of Joey, a thoroughbred that is taken from its young master, Albert (Jeremy Irvine) and sold to the British army at the onset of World War I, thereby beginning a journey that takes it from a British officer to a couple of deserting German soldiers to an adorable-but-sickly French girl and her grandpapa to the corpse-filled trenches of the battlefield. Meanwhile, in the hopes of one day reuniting with his horse, Albert leaves his parents (Peter Mullan and Emily Watson, the latter frankly redoing her role from the long-forgotten adaptation of "Angela's Ashes") and enlists himself, a move that opens his eyes to the horrors of war, at least until they are temporarily blinded via a convenient gas attack. I wouldn't dream of revealing if boy and beast are reunited but if they are, you can surely bet that such a reunion will be presented in the most shameless manner possible.

I don't mind that the film is melodramatic and frankly sentimental--that is its entire raison d'être, after all--but what I do object to is that it is melodramatic and frankly sentimental in the worst possible ways. For starters, even though Spielberg is no stranger to sentiment, he ladles it on so thickly here (especially with the help of John Williams' unrelenting and obtrusive score) that I found myself resenting his relentless attempts at manipulation after a while--at times it feels as if the film is leaping off the screen to grab you by the lapels in order to throttle you into submission.Then there is the fact that Spielberg is unable to make the horse into a compelling character to hang a narrative around--this is possible, as anyone who has seen the gorgeous "The Black Stallion" can attest, but he can do nothing more with the animal than turn it into a four-legged version of the topcoat in "Tales of Manhattan" that linked all the disparate vignettes together.

To make up for this, he instead spends plenty of time following Albert around, a move that might have worked if it weren't for the fact that the character, at least as embodied here, is so creepy in the way that it fixates on the animal literally from its birth that the whole enterprise begins to feel like a prequel to "Equus" at times. There are a few decent moments scattered here and there--the early battle sequence where the British troops heedlessly storm into what turns out to be a slaughter at the hands of the more heavily-armed Germans is a masterful creation--but those are unfortunately counter-balanced by some of the lamest and most ham-handed sequences that Spielberg has ever presented (the worst being the already-infamous bit in which a German soldier and a British soldier join forces in the middle of a temporary cease-fire to free the horse from the barbed wire it is trapped in while musing ludicrously and at interminable length about the nature of a "war horse."

Seemingly conceived more as a vehicle to score Oscar nominations than anything else, "War Horse" is a long, boring and vaguely insulting mess that offers up the depressing sight of an infinitely talented filmmaker simply going through the motions, as elaborate as they may be, and the end result pretty much does for the subjects of war and horses what "Amistad" did for slavery--nada.

link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=20713&reviewer=389
originally posted: 01/24/12 10:42:15
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