Buffalo Soldiers reportedly received its first press screening two days before the attacks on the World Trade Center. More recently, just as the film studio geared up for a major push with the film, Dubya Bush decided that Iraq needed a regime change. What's so peculiar about that? Well, when the central character of your movie is an opportunistic but thoroughly amoral army soldier (Joaquin Phoenix) on the take in every way possible, you may have problems when it comes to the national mood. If that wasn't bad enough, the majority of the army in Buffalo Soldiers is depicted as being made up of smack heads, idiot savants, the woefully misguided and the sadistic. Needless to say, Buffalo Soldiers is unlikely to break any box office records Stateside.
But that shouldn't stop you from seeing this gleefully satirical piece of work, a film which comes across like a demented, post modern version of The Phil Silvers Show. Set in the former West Germany as the Berlin Wall is coming down, Phoenix is intensely charismatic as the self-serving Elwood, a private whose ex-army pursuits have incurred the wrath of his new Sergeant (a brutish Scott Glenn). The sort of chap who enjoys a challenge - as his plan to sell a cache of stolen weapons for heroin proves - Elwood decides that he should really pursue his ball busting superior's alluring teenage daughter (Anna Paquin). Just to really annoy him.
Robust and delightfully cynical, Buffalo Soldiers is a black hearted minor gem of a film. Director Gregor Jordan adds a hefty veneer of scepticism to the acrid and tightly wound screenplay. But what really drives the film is the excellent performance of Phoenix, whose alluring manipulation is a joy to behold.
