Vietnam War movies, ranked

A decade after risking his life and sanity to complete “Apocalypse Now," Francis Ford Coppola returned to the subject of Vietnam with this low-key drama about an aging Army Sergeant (James Caan) assigned to the Honor Guard at Arlington National Cemetery. Coppola was gearing up for a passion project in “Tucker: The Man and His Dream," so, while this is a long way from for-hire work (as opposed to “Jack”), it does feel like he’s somewhat disengaged from the material. The film is at its best when the actors bat around Ron Bass’ dialogue over dinner; this is where Coppola captures the in-the-moment paralysis of Americans facing a war absent an objective or endgame.

Mel Gibson’s “The Green Berets." Randall Wallace is the credited director on this, but the film’s mix of battlefield honor and wanton gruesomeness is all Gibson — which, given the setting, isn’t uncalled for. Largely shot in Monterey County, this film feels nostalgic for Ted Post’s “Go Tell the Spartans." It also nicks a scene from Phillip Noyce’s “Newsfront." But Gibson is such a commanding presence that you overlook the cheapness of the production (which, at $75 million, yikes!) and take it as another example of the filmmaker’s devotion to lost causes.

A down-and-dirty B-movie set in the ‘Nam, “Off Limits” sizzles for a solid 70 minutes before pulling up lame down the stretch. The opening scene scored to The Left Banke’s “Pretty Ballerina” is a stunner, and the ensuing buddy-cop antics between Willem Dafoe and Gregory Hines, playing CIDs charged with working a serial killer case in Saigon during the war, get you invested in Christopher Crowe’s well-told mystery. It’s a character-actor smorgasbord with Fred Ward, David Alan Grier and Scott Glenn buoyed by a splendid late-second-act twist. But once it plays that card, you know precisely where the film’s headed.

Buddy Giovinazzo’s “Combat Shock” is a depressing, no-budget depiction of a traumatized Vietnam Vet (Ricky Giovinazzo, the director’s brother) living in Staten Island squalor with his angry wife (Veronica Stork) and their badly deformed baby (the genetic gift of prolonged Agent Orange exposure). Released theatrically by Troma Entertainment in the mid-1980s, the film was dismissed by critics as miserablist schlock and quickly disappeared to home video where it found a cult following. The extended director’s cut of the movie is not for everyone, but if you’ve got the stomach for it, it’s a harrowing depiction of discarded humanity that will leave you shaken and disgusted.

Joel Schumacher’s basic training drama is set in Fort Polk, Louisiana, in the late summer, which makes this an anti-do-anything-outside-of-air-conditioning movie. It’s a fabulous showcase for Colin Farrell, who became one of Hollywood’s most sought after stars based on this performance, but it’s most impressive for Schumacher finally dedicating his tremendous visual talent to a story he cares about. This is a deeply human movie wrought with pain and disillusionment, emotions the openly gay Schumacher has been well acquainted with throughout most of career.

Peter Markle’s rescue drama is set in Vietnam, but we’ve seen this drama play out in numerous war films throughout the last century. Still, it’s gripping stuff, thanks in large part to the radio chemistry between Gene Hackman and Danny Glover. Hackman plays the pilot of a light bomber that gets shot down over North Vietnam at the outset of a major U.S. strike; Glover is the pilot of a Cessna spy plane who picks up Hackman’s distress signal and coordinates an extraction. The film’s technical specificity lends it an air of uncommon authenticity, and that extra effort – along with the presence of country music legend Jerry Reed – keeps you invested. It’s a nifty dad movie.

Albert and Allen Hughes bit off a little more than they could chew with this expansive crime flick about young men (Larenz Tate, Chris Tucker and Freddy Rodriguez) who return from Vietnam to make a go at armored-car robbery, but it has moments of widescreen brilliance that take your breath away. Tate and his crew have no great affection for their country, so once the going gets vicious in Vietnam they’re rudderless. There’s a whole film to be made out of this experience, and it’s a shame that no one’s zeroed in on it (save for 1995’s “The Walking Dead," which is terrible). The soundtrack is sensational, however, and Tucker owns every scene he’s in.

Sammo Hung’s men-on-a-mission masterpiece is a postwar yarn about an American army colonel (Lam Ching-ying) rounding up a ragtag group of Chinese-American soldiers to destroy a leftover bunker loaded with missiles. Boasting an all-star Hong Kong cinema cast comprised of Hung, Yuen Biao, Billy Chow, Corey Yuen and Yuen Woo-ping, this isn’t as sober-minded as most of the films on this list, but it’s a lot less sillier than Sammo’s usual output (e.g. he borrows the Russian Roulette scene from “The Deer Hunter”). This one’s pure entertainment, and it hits on all cylinders.

Vietnam vet Patrick Sheane Duncan’s “84 Charlie MoPic” was well ahead of its time. Though it won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1989 Sundance Film Festival, the film’s subjective camera approach (what we now call “found footage”) was deemed too experimental for moviegoers of that era. It is ripe for rediscovery. The movie follows a reconnaissance patrol into treacherous North Vietnamese territory where their mission predictably goes south. These films are always hardest on actors (who have to play every moment as characters who are unaccustomed to being on camera), but they pull it off magnificently (“24” fans will be thrilled to see Glenn “Aaron” Morshower in the mix). It hits hard.

American filmmakers weren’t quite ready to deal with the ground-level brutality of the fully escalated Vietnam War in the immediate aftermath of the conflict’s conclusion, but this 1964-set programmer about an understaffed U.S. Army outpost ordered to expand its South Vietnam base of operations to an abandoned nearby village is a sharply scripted sliver of hindsight. Though Ted Post directs the film like it’s an episode of “Combat” (it was shot in a very dry-looking Valencia, California, on some very flimsy sets), the lack of finesse works in the movie’s favor. These structures, like the troops’ presence, are temporary, but Burt Lancaster’s Major Asa Barker sees the mission creep a-comin’. His soldiers quickly find themselves as outnumbered and overwhelmed as the Spartans at Thermopylae. Watching a sixty-four-year-old Lancaster limp around the battlefield on an in-real-life bad knee gives the film added poignancy.

This may be the weirdest film of Werner Herzog’s career in that it’s stolidly conventional and almost wholly devoid of quirk. It’s a dramatization of the director’s documentary “Little Dieter Needs to Fly," which told the tale of a U.S. Navy pilot (Christian Bale) who escaped a Vietcong prison camp after being shot down during a clandestine bombing mission. Aside from a whacked-out performance from Jeremy Davies, this is a straightforward, completely apolitical survival story from the ‘Nam, and it works sensationally well on these terms.

Phillip Noyce’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s prescient 1955 novel about a world-weary British journalist (Michael Caine) working out of Saigon who watches in horror as a charismatic CIA agent (Brendan Fraser) tries to steal his live-in girlfriend (Do Thi Hai Yen) and, more despicably, orchestrates violence to further his country’s objectives in Vietnam. Graham’s distaste for Americans post-WWII drips from every frame of Noyce’s gorgeously shot (by ace cinematographer Christopher Doyle) movie, and you’ll feel just as angry and helpless as you watch Fraser’s operative lay the track for a slow-motion train wreck that’ll stretch into the 1970s.

Oliver Stone’s epic of American disillusionment was a warmup to the damn-near insurrectionist “JFK," and, in retrospect, feels like the most personal work of his career. Tom Cruise stars as Ron Kovic, an idealistic teenager who buys into President Kennedy’s inaugural exhortation of doing what he can for his country, only to get cut down in a Vietnam firefight, which leaves him paralyzed from the chest down. Stone’s attraction to the warrior mindset (he wrote “Conan the Barbarian” and “Alexander”) clashes with his righteous indignation. This is not an anti-war film, and that’s where it gets muddled. War is not the problem. Imperialism, however, is an ultimate evil. And so in Stone’s view, pretending the U.S. is about anything other than global domination, while pumping up its children with a star-spangled lie, is a sin.

This highly fictionalized account of Armed Forces Radio DJ Adrian Cronauer provided Robin Williams with a perfect showcase for his steam-of-consciousness comedy brilliance and his serious acting chops. Barry Levinson and screenwriter Mitch Markowitz turn the film into an argument for levity in the midst of combat; though the film shines a light on AFRS’ efficacy as a propaganda outfit, it’s largely a humanistic tale of one man trying to give his fellow Americans a sense of normalcy. When his sense of humor takes on a counterculture bent, he’s bounced from the country. This isn’t a revelation, but Williams’ sincerity makes it sting. His Cronauer just wants these fellas to laugh before they’re blown to bits.

Vetsploitation was a viable Hollywood genre in the late ‘70s and throughout much of the ‘80s. “First Blood," “The Exterminator," “Thou Shalt Not Kill… Except”… even “Taxi Driver” to a degree. A year after introducing the world to Travis Bickle, screenwriter Paul Schrader brought us Maj. Charles Rane, who returns home to Texas after seven years as a POW in Vietnam to find his wife is engaged to a local cop. His situation worsens dramatically when outlaws murder his wife and child, and leave him for dead with a mangled hand. Steamed but good, Rane does what we’d all do: he saws off a double-barreled shotgun, sharpens his new prosthetic hook into a instrument of ouch, and hooks up with his war buddy Johnny Vohden (Tommy Lee Jones). What happens next is more than a little satisfying.

Michael Gambon is superb as President Lyndon B. Johnson, the bullheaded Texan whose legacy is at stake as he contemplates escalating the war in Vietnam. It’s surprising there haven’t been more dramas about Johnson’s tragic error; he’s egged on the warmongers he inherited from Kennedy, but open to counsel from the State Department’s George Bell (Bruce McGill), who correctly views the war as an unwinnable quagmire. At three hours, it’s an epic drama of debate about the direction of our country, all of it managed brilliantly by John Frankenheimer, who passed away shortly after it aired on HBO. We were so very close to backing away from the abyss. 

John Irvin’s powerful film about one of the bloodiest offensives of the Vietnam War was released less than a year after “Platoon” rattled the nation, and is in some ways superior to the Best Picture winner. Rather than reinforce the senselessness of the war with an on-the-nose voiceover, Irvin and screenwriter James Carabatsos (a Vietnam veteran) place us in the tumult with a motley but committed crew of soldiers determined to take a hill because those are their orders. The film does succeeds best at capturing the African-American perspective on the war via the jaded Doc (Courtney B. Vance), who, upon finding a headless G.I. corpse, fumes that the Army doesn’t also require dog tags around the ankles. Don Cheadle and Michael Boatman are also superb as black men risking their lives because they lacked the options/connections to avoid getting drafted. “It don’t mean nothin’. Not a thing.”

Michael Cimino’s blue-collar Vietnam epic won Best Picture for its unvarnished dramatization of the many horrors visited on U.S. soldiers, like POWs being forced into games of Russian roulette by their Viet Cong captors. OK, there’s no credible historical evidence of this ever happening, but Cimino’s drama treats the war (and, lamentably, the country) as a lawless hellhole that swallows its unwanted combatants alive. It’s a trial by fire for these dutiful Pennsylvania steel workers (Robert De Niro Christopher Walken and John Savage), but it’s not their patriotism that’s being tested; it’s their friendship. In the end, after a somber group-sing of “God Bless America," it’s all they have and, through no fault of their own, all they understand.

The psychological toll of the Vietnam War is at the forefront of Adrian Lyne’s hallucinatory thriller about a veteran, Jacob, (Tim Robbins) who’s haunted by the memory of an attack that wiped out most of his company. Written by Bruce Joel Rubin (“Ghost”), the film hinges on a twist that, depending on your read, is either cathartic or condemnatory. Jacob struggles to readjust to civilian life. He longs for the life he had before the war and especially misses his son, Gabe (Macaulay Culkin), who died in an accident before he left. It’s not just his life that’s broken. It’s the world. Maybe he should’ve just died on the field of combat. When you look at the film that way, Jacob’s final surrender isn’t terribly comforting.

Jane Fonda and Jon Voight both won Oscars for their smashing performances in Hal Ashby’s home front drama about a conservative soldier’s wife who, while her husband (Bruce Dern) is stationed in Vietnam, falls for a high school acquaintance who’s returned from the war a paraplegic. Working from a keenly observed script by Waldo Salt and Robert C. Jones (based on a story by the great Nancy Dowd), Ashby avoids every mawkish pitfall as he explores the budding romance between two people transformed by the conflict. It’s in the same post-combat class as “The Best Years of Our Lives."

Widely considered the first movie to show it like it was, Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” remains a harrowing account of soldiers at war with the enemy and each other. Though Stone’s trademark heavy touch, largely felt through Charlie Sheen’s voiceovers, is unwelcome as ever, at least it’s in keeping with the film’s blunt-force approach. It’s the work of an artist who went through the hell of combat and returned home a different, damaged man. It’s also the war movie equivalent of “The Outsiders” in terms of showcasing young talent: Sheen, Willem Dafoe, Forest Whitaker, Keith David, Johnny Depp, Kevin Dillon and Living Colour’s Corey Glover were all just getting started when this film took the pop culture (and the Academy Awards) by storm.

John Woo’s Hong Kong take on the Vietnam War thrusts three best friends (Tony Leung, Waise Lee and Jacky Cheung) into the conflict as smugglers who stumble across a stash of gold that could set them up for life. It’s transparently a “Deer Hunter” riff, but Woo’s take on loyalty and friendship is quite different — and way more intense — than Cimino’s. His characters aren’t simple steel workers from Pennsylvania; they’re low-on-the-totem hustlers looking to make a killing off America’s warmongering arrogance. This is the chaos and death that happens on the periphery when the U.S. screws up. Woo’s virtuosic gift for staging gunfights is on vigorous display here, as is his operatic sense of tragedy. “The Killer” and “Hard Boiled” get most of the love, but “Bullet in the Head” is, front to back, his finest work.

The best Vietnam film ever shot in Cambridgeshire, England, Stanley Kubrick’s bifurcated war film captures the dehumanizing method of preparing men for combat and the boots-on-the-ground experience that finishes them off. Matthew Modine’s “Joker” is easily Kubrick’s most likable protagonist since David Bowman; he’s a smartass who finds a way around the flame of warfare until he’s pinned down in the s**t with his fellow soldiers. War deadens the soul of all who engage in it. In the end, all these warriors want is to be children again, singing the “Mickey Mouse Club” theme in front of their parents’ television sets.

The 1966 incident on Hill 192 – in which members of the 8^th  Cavalry kidnapped, raped and murdered a young Vietnamese girl – scandalized the U.S. military the same year as the My Lai Massacre and prompted two controversial movies (Michael Verhoeven’s “o.k.” and Elia Kazan’s “The Visitors). Though the outrage faded, the story stayed with filmmaker Brian De Palma, who capitalized on his first summer blockbuster (“The Untouchables”) to make this studio-backed masterpiece about one of the most heinous war crimes in American combat history. Sean Penn paints a terrifying portrait of combat-triggered psychosis; he views their unlawful detainee as “portable R&R," and fulminates at length as to how he is justified to violate her any way he pleases. This is raw American entitlement. The world is our plaything. The ensuing court martial is viewed by top brass as more of an inconvenience than justice. The whistleblower (Michael J. Fox) takes the shame and the horror home, knowing he did the right thing and it didn’t make a damn bit of difference.

“Someday this war’s gonna end.” Robert Duvall’s Lt. Kilgore’s talking about Vietnam, but the sentiment applies to Francis Ford Coppola’s arduous 238-day shoot that soared way over budget, tested the filmmaker’s sanity and nearly killed Martin Sheen. The film’s excesses —primarily Marlon Brando’s torpid grandstanding and, in the extended “Redux” cut, the French plantation sequence — are an untidy extension of its conceptual madness. It’s a down-the-river masterpiece that terminates at the banks of an American warlord’s stronghold in a foreign country he’s all but destroyed. This is the end of conquest. It’s a vision Americans need to reckon with before it’s too late.