Producers: Peter Berg, Brian Grazer and Alex Gayner Director: Peter Berg Screenplay: Peter Berg and Mark L. Smith Cast: Nicholas Galitzine, Bill Skarsgård, Ray Nicholson, Tom Francis, Brent Comer, Pat McAfee, Dominic Bogart, Stacy Clausen, Ella Newton, Blake Erickson, Steven Sammut, Claudia Ware and Peter Berg Distributor: Netflix
Grade: C-
Peter Berg’s aptitude for pulling off viscerally exciting combat scenes doesn’t fail him in this World War II drama; nor does his skill in staging football games, which he demonstrated with “Friday Night Lights” as far back as 2004. Based on the 2022 Buzz Bissinger novel subtitled “A Game of Life and Death in World War II,” “The Mosquito Bowl” combines the two. But though earnest in intent and visually impressive, from the banal quotation from Herbert Hoover that opens the picture to a post-war coda it’s so cliché-ridden and heavy-handed that its technical virtues count for little.
It’s a tale of patriotism amid the horrors of war in the Pacific in the period 1941-1945. The patriots on whom the script focuses are four college gridiron stars who joined the Marines after Pearl Harbor: John McLaughry (Nicholas Galitzine), quarterback at Brown University, rusher Tony Butkovich (Ray Nicholson) of Purdue, and two University of Wisconsin pals, tackle Bob Bauman (Bill Skarsgård) and end Dave Schreiner (Tom Francis).
The film begins with a prologue in which McLaughry, the lone survivor of the quartet, returns to the college stadiums in 1945, to remember the games played in their final season. He recalls his own last contest, but the emphasis is on the Purdue-Wisconsin matchup in which cocky Butkovich embarrassed Bauman and Schreiner by establishing a rushing record despite their best efforts to stop him.
In the flashback that makes up the rest of the movie, each man is given a perfunctory personality sketch as they enlist. That’s followed by a standard-issue episode of basic training, where they’re treated with predictable harshness by a drill instructor (Pat McAfee) who spews out a stream of insults and bromides about learning to love your rifle. It’s a jokey, dumbed-down version of what Stanley Kubrick achieved in “Full Metal Jacket.”
The story then switches to the Pacific theatre, where all four men are in the same Marine squad involved in the amphibious assault at Guadalcanal. Berg, cinematographer Jacques Jouffret, editors Jon Otazua and Garret Donnelly and composers Explosions in the Sky jointly execute the harrowing sequence, and the battle on land that follows it, with great skill, even if we’ve seen similar sequences done with equal impact in films from “Saving Private Ryan” in 1998 to the recent “Pressure.”
There follows the battle of Tarawa in 1943 and the ensuing interlude of 1943-44, when the Marines were stationed on the conquered islands while preparations were made for the 1945 assault on Okinawa. It was during this stressful time among the men that the brass had the idea of improving morale by allowing a football game between the 4th and 29th regiments of the 6th division on a quickly-constructed field. The game, which happened on Christmas Eve of 1944, occurs around the ninety-minute mark of the two-hour film.
It’s staged with a great deal of energy but little coherence on the muddy terrain, and we’re led to believe that it achieves the hoped-for morale boast before General Buckner (a cameo for Berg himself) gives a speech preparatory to sending the division into battle on Okinawa. That battle, in which three of the protagonists die, is once again powerfully rendered from a visual perspective, and the men’s deaths are depicted in shockingly explicit style (though the desaturated gray-green color palette Berg and Jouffret prefer has a disconcertingly artsy feel).
So does the habit of cutting periodically to a shot of earth from space, looking beautifully blue and peaceful as a contrast to the grotesque violence being perpetrated in the areas of it the film concentrates on. These inserts aim at a degree of profundity that, unfortunately, the film never achieves. Impressive on the surface, it has remarkably little depth; even the game, which is meant to be of central significance, passes by as decently staged but basically inconsequential. If it’s meant as a microcosm of the larger conflict in which it serves as a momentary relief, the point isn’t successfully made.
There’s another distraction in the depiction of a USO performance by Bob Hope, Jerry Colonna and Frances Langford at Guadalcanal, another effort at morale boosting that, we’re told, didn’t match the impact of the game. Inserting clips of the show isn’t itself a bad idea, but juxtaposing archival clips with newly-shot footage featuring actors who bear minimal resemblance to the performers (Blake Erickson as Hope, Steven Sammut as Colonna and Claudia Ware Langford) is. It destroys the illusion of reality the film is trying to create.
Under the circumstances the young stars, all talented as their previous work demonstrates, are reduced to giving one-note performances. Skarsgård and Francis play the former Badger teammates as guys of different temperaments, but the script never goes beyond that to give them nuance; only Nicholson’s sheer bravado as Boilermaker Butkovich stands out. Galitzine pretty much buries his charisma as McLaughry; even in the coda, in which he pays tribute to his fallen comrades, the treatment allows him no more than stone-faced determination. It should be added that production designer Philip Ivey and costumer Liz McGregor have done their jobs admirably
“The Mosquito Bowl” wants to illuminate the sacrifice made by so many combatants in World War II and other conflicts through the story of these footballers in the Pacific campaign, emphasizing how the potential of three of them was cruelly ended, and that of the fourth forever altered, by the horrific experience of war. But it never manages to universalize that theme; the other men in their ranks remain nothing more than extras in their story. As a tribute to them, therefore, the movie works to some degree, though among World War II dramas it’s hardly exceptional. Its grander ambitions, however, go unrealized.