The action is brilliant, the combat sharp and rattling, and the film follows the historical record more closely than most Hollywood films.

The Great Raid is perhaps more timely now than it would have been a few years ago, when "smart bombs" and a couple of weeks of warfare were supposed to solve the Iraq situation. Now that we are involved in a lengthy and bloody ground war there, it is good to have a film that is not about entertainment for action fans, but about how wars are won with great difficulty, risk, and cost.

Lacks the visceral sweep of "Saving Private Ryan." But Spielberg's story, for all its gut-wrenching intensity, was a fiction. Dahl's movie, slower in pace and conscious of its own artifice, addresses the same issues of courage and sacrifice - and tells a true story. That's worth something. In fact, it's worth a lot.

While one might have wished for a better movie, and a few smarter decisions regarding the screenplay, generally it's a riveting, even inspirational account of an American feat of arms about which few know but about which many more should.

The film is much better as a ticking-clock action picture than as a story of human emotions, be they romantic, altruistic or base. So it's too bad that we have to wait so long for the actual raid to begin. When it does, it's a cracker.

Truth be told, the film is routine: the kind of one-note war movie that Hollywood used to crank out by the dozens every year in the 1950s.

The rousing success of the final 45 minutes cannot entirely counterbalance the stumbling uncertainty of the first 90 minutes.

The Great Raid amounts to a noble failure. This is sad news for those of us who remain hopelessly partial to Dahl's mean streak. The failure we can live with. It's the noble part that will never do.

Not a great movie, but it certainly does justice to the great historical event it dramatizes.

With material like this, Samuel Fuller or David Lean might have fashioned an epic war movie for the ages, chock-full of hard-boiled characters and against-all-odds heroics. But in John Dahl's hands, The Great Raid never really lives up to its name, delivering everything you might expect from such a movie, but not an ounce more.

Benjamin Bratt lacks the dynamism one would expect of the commanding officer of a U.S. Rangers rescue unit; James Franco, however, is solid in the less flashy role of the mission's mastermind, and as the POW leader Joseph Fiennes manages to be heroic while prettily languishing from malaria.

This is a creditable but disappointingly draggy war epic. It should sizzle like a fuse, but instead plods along with methodical deliberation.

The Great Raid tells its story without irony, perspective or any leavening that would make it something other than an ordinary military-action caper.

The picture's broad outline may be fact, but everything inside gets painted in a deep shade of bogus.