I wasn’t expecting much of “Faith of My Fathers“. The title is slicky and the DVD cover with the pair of military boots didn’t promise much.
Directed by: Peter Markle
Genres: Biography, Drama, War
Cast: Thomas Madell, Michael Arata, Tony Bentley, Brian Bossetta, Jude Cambise, Joe Chrest, Erin Cottrell, Korbi Dean, Carol Dupuy, Louis Dupuy, Brian F. Durkin, J.D. Evermore, Jeff Galpin, Scott Glenn, Nicholas Sean Gomez, Douglas M. Griffin, Justin Groetsch, Shawn Hatosy, Robert Heath Hickman, Elton LeBlanc, Jerry Leggio, Chi Moui Lo, Earl Maddox, Marc Preston, Glenn Robin, Johnny Rock, Troy Ruptash, Arthur Simone, Gary Michael Smith, Jason Alan Smith, Todd J. Smith, Spike Spencer, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Ashley Taylor, Louis Webre, Shea Whigham
IMDB raintg: 6.3
My rating: 3.0 [rate 3.0]
And I didn’t get much.
The film is based on a biography of some US Senator who was a prisoner of war (POW) and survived Vietnamese prison for several years back in the day. That’s about all there is to it except for a few minor details that concern the history of his family being all military and so on.
The story itself, while very simplistic and shaky, is rather potent and could have been developed into a serious drama film. But it wasn’t. On the contrary, it was weakend and bloated with propaganda and cheap sounding dialogues. Needless to say that spoiled pretty much everything.
But I couldn’t have stayed through the film if there wasn’t something to enjoy. And, in fact, there was. I really liked some of the photography. Not all of it. And not most. But some of it. I guess that photography that I didn’t enjoy was spoiled by editing. You see, this film needed to have faster scene switching. Much faster. As it is, it was pretty slow and boring. Nice looking shots were displayed for far too long and that was killing the interest and intrigue. But there were still some very eye pleasing frames, I’ll tell you that.
In general, you would probably try to avoid this film, unless you like lots of American propaganda and seriously unnatural dialogues. If you do, than that’s your movie.