“Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” goes nowhere.
The Iraq war movie — which stars newcomer Joe Alwyn as a 19-year-old private, and Kristen Stewart as his concerned older sister — has been sold as a brave new movie experiment.
Its 3D is better than anything you’ve seen. Its focus is sharper than anything you’ve witnessed. Hell, even the frame rate — 120 per second — is five times faster than normal.
Except all those visuals shows us nothing. We feel nothing.
The story stars Alwyn as Billy, a Texas teenager who became an unexpected hero in Iraq. Now he and the rest of Bravo Company are back in the U.S., on a pro-war propaganda tour courtesy of the Army and an interested Hollywood producer.
Except at their big public appearance at a big football game, Billy starts having PTSD flashbacks.
There’s little in the battle scenes that we haven’t seen before. The soldiers themselves are reduced to racial shorthand — the Mexican guy, the black guy, the Asian guy. All we’re missing is a would-be Romeo called “Hollywood.” (That’s OK — we got him last week, in “Hacksaw Ridge.”)
And when we do get someone out of the ordinary, he’s really out of the ordinary — Vin Diesel as a mystic Sarge who quotes Lord Krishna and send grunts into bloody battle with a sincere, face-to-face “I love you.” He’s called Shroom and I think I know why, bro.
It’s all a little unbelievable. What makes it worse is that director Ang Lee — who once directed intimate dramas like “Sense and Sensibility” and “Brokeback Mountain” — forgets about the characters to focus on all those whiz-bang visuals.
But the film is so hyper-realistic, it ends up looking ultra-fake. The 3D effects feel like something from an old ViewMaster reel. The photography — wiped clean of blur or shadow — has all the human warmth of internet porn.
True, the central scene, set in a clamorous football stadium, is thrilling. And there are some moments of real emotion — mostly back at Billy’s Texas home, where he talks with his agonized, anti-war sister. Those scenes with Stewart feel like something from a real movie.
Of course, they’re also the scenes where Lee dials down the HD clarity, and eases up on the eye-popping 3D.
That’s because real films breathe, alive with imperfections, accidents, with everything that Lee’s worked so carefully to guard against. “Billy Lynn’s Long Half Time Walk” is long, all right, but only half-alive — as careful as a diagram, as chilly as a statue.
