Only the Brave (2006) starring Tamlyn Tomita, Lane Nishikawa, Greg Watanabe, Mark Dacascos directed by Lane Nishikawa Movie Review

Only the Brave (2006)   2/52/52/52/52/5


Only the Brave (2006) starring Tamlyn Tomita, Lane Nishikawa, Greg Watanabe, Mark Dacascos

Only for the Few

Following the attack on Pear Harbour Japanese Americans found themselves thrown into internment camps for the rest of the war. But a group of over 1,000 loyal Japanese Americans petition the Government for a right to fight for their country and in doing so become the 100th Infantry Battalion. Sent from one country to another this group of Japanese American's continually prove themselves none more so when in France they rescued the Texas 36th Division.

The above synopsis is a reworking of the one you will find in many places about "Only the Brave" but in truth is not very specific to the movie as what we actually have is Jimmy Takata who eight years after the war is struggling with life and what we get are his memories of war, those he served with and the dangers they faced. Unfortunately his memories of war, which means a lot of flashbacks, are disjointed and they seem to bounce all over the place making "Only the Brave" not the easiest of movies to follow especially as it throws us into the mix without giving us introductions to characters.

It is not just the lack of narrative flow which causes "Only the Brave" to be a hard movie to watch because this is also a low budget, independent movie and the general quality is not good. Image quality is not sharp enough; camera shake makes it often impossible to know who you are watching and the acting whilst not terrible never really grabs you. In fairness part of the trouble is that everything I mentioned makes it hard for characters to really develop who we can follow.

Now the annoying thing is that the story of these Japanese Americans is worthy of being told and if I only judged a movie on the story then I might be persuaded to rate "Only the Brave" a lot higher. But as a whole it has a lot of issues all of which combine to stop it from being as good as it should be.

What this all boils down to is that "Only the Brave" whilst telling an important story doesn't do the story justice and ends up a movie dragged down by a series of issues which makes it hard to follow and get into.


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