FOR QUEEN & COUNTRY
With Denzel Washington, George Baker, and Amanda Redman.
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One hardly can name a mainstream American feature–apart from Stone’s Wall Street and John Carpenter’s They Live–that confronts or satirizes chic reactionary values. In Britain dissenting filmmakers, often with crucial funding from the independent Channel Four, are less inhibited and more prolific. If the Iron Lady succeeds (and she is trying) in creating a kind of “Committee on Un-British Activities,” impertinent filmmakers will be irresistible targets.
For Queen & Country opens with an improbable scene of soldiers in civilian clothes reeling out of a Northern Irish pub at closing time to face a sudden sniper ambush. (The ambush is likely; that soldiers would carelessly gather in a pub in a guerrilla zone is not.) Reuben is wounded but saved by a trusty Caucasian sidekick nicknamed “Fish” (Dorian Healy). Cut to several years later aboard an invasion ship; Reuben crouches in full combat gear, ready to spring through a door into the frozen Falklands night. Cut two more years later to Reuben, freshly discharged, getting rough treatment from not-so-amiable constables who are dumbfounded at the notion that this bit of riffraff fought in a “British war”–meaning a ruddy white-complexioned conflict. Later Reuben fends off an offer of employment from a drug dealer, is manipulated by a local thug into lying to the police, and strikes up a warm acquaintance with a tough-tender woman (Amanda Redman) next door after capturing her sticky-fingered teenage daughter ripping off items in his flat. The public-housing estate resembles a concrete fortress–a displaced piece of the Maginot Line, maybe–and teems with thieves, junkies, prostitutes, and a wide assortment of ne’er-do-wells.
