Here, the veteran violence fetishist De Palma puts on his appalled hat to lay down a faux-documentary dramatisation of the Al-Mahmudiyah killings in Iraq.
The medium of choice is a grainy video diary by one of the squad members, interspersed with faceless Al-Qaeda webcast clips and snippets from a mocked-up TV documentary, overladen with portentous music and images. As the title explicitly states, what De Palma is presenting is a redacted, i.e. composite, overview in which all these clashing elements are presumably meant to add up to a balanced whole.
What we get instead is a stew in which all the ingredients are half-baked. The fictionalised plot featuring misguided and brutal GIs is little more than a retread of De Palma's own Casualties of War, right down to pale stand-ins for Sean Penn's xenophobic sociopath and Michael J. Fox's anguished righteous lone voice from that film, but without half of the intensity. As for the Iraqi perspective, it's almost entirely absent, bar one sentimentalised grieving father and a My Lai-style photomontage, not that this comes as any surprise after endless US-centric depictions of Vietnam.
De Palma is so clearly piping up for a worthy cause here in rubbing its more easily encapsulable atrocities in America's face, but with execution this inept he soon found that America's face had chosen to turn to jingoistic actioners like The Kingdom instead. Opportunity missed.
4/10
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