I just returned from a sneak preview of Brian DePalma's Redacted, and I feel compelled to warn people not to drop $12 on this film when it opens Friday, for it is one mediocre war movie.

Bizarrely, to my mind, DePalma picked up a Silver Lion award for best direction at the Venice Film Festival earlier this year. I don't think it should have earned a "best" anything at any film festival.

The story is based on a real incident. In March 2006, U.S. soldiers raped and killed Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi, a 14-year-old Iraqi girl. They also killed her parents and sister. This took place in Mahmudiyah, located south of Baghdad in an area nicknamed "the triangle of death."

The fictionalized version takes place in Samarra, another Sunni insurgent hotbed.

None of the characters we see on film are particularly interesting. If you've seen any Iraq movie -- actually, almost any war movie ever made -- you've seen them before. Check out Gunner Palace sometime.

DePalma finds it fascinating that so much stuff makes it to the Internet these days, and that virtually every soldier has a digital video recorder in his pocket. If I'm not mistaken, much of the Iraq footage in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 was sent to him by soldiers. You can also check out this article from PBS's MediaShift. You might want to see this 2006 post about the documentary The War Tapes, cobbled together from soldier-shot footage. So I find myself asking what's so new about that concept in late 2007 as to compel the creation of a feature film?

Here's some of what DePalma told reporters in Venice, according to a Reuters story:

"The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what is happening in Iraq to the American people. The pictures are what will stop the war. One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to motivate their Congressmen to vote against this war."

There have been documentaries which have shown graphic images of the human cost of the war. I know. I've seen them. And by now, most sentient Americans think the Iraq war was a big mistake -- and rightly so. If DePalma thinks this effort will create new political will to end U.S. involvement in Iraq, I suspect he's fooling himself.

Now, allow me to say something mildly positive.

For me, the most stunning statistic in the film is that of 2,000 Iraqis killed by U.S. forces at checkpoints, only 60 have been insurgents (one scene has the soldiers firing on a car navigating the checkpoint. The driver was in a hurry to take his pregnant sister to hospital; he thought the soldiers were waving him through).*

* The film claims that 50 per cent of Iraqis are illiterate and don't understand the signage at the checkpoints. If so, why didn't the U.S. have loudspeaker systems that play a canned message telling people to slow down?

The most horrible scene is undoubtedly the attack on the girl, but I'm surprised DePalma didn't have the most villainous soldiers wear black top hats or have wax handlebar mustaches that they could twirl.

The actors just didn't hit the right notes for me in that scene. A better example of moral breakdown during war can be seen in Oliver Stone's Platoon, where Charlie Sheen's character intervenes to save a young Vietnamese girl from sexual assault at the hands of his platoon mates. And lest we forget, DePalma directed his own Vietnam atrocities movie -- 1989's Casualties of War, with Michael J. Fox.

Actually, the actors didn't hit the right notes for me throughout the entire film. The writing is sophomoric and the direction heavy-handed. My eyes practically spun around in my sockets during the "war hero" scene.

I'm usually up for a good "war is hell" film, but this one did nothing for me. Once again, stay away.