The driver of a pickup truck gets shot through the windshield before the vehicle flips over. The police enforcer angrily unloads a pistol into an already-dead body. Burnett slogs through a muddy mass grave, climbing over severed body parts (there’s a flashback to how those bodies got there, as common folk are lined up and mowed down by a firing squad, then beaten to pieces). An officer steps on a mine and we hear him blow up. Many buildings get devastated and the body count mounts. Tanks, machine guns, landmines, trip-wires and other instruments of destruction take their toll. A vicious sniper targets Burnett throughout. He is interrogated and then shot in the head at close range. Stackhouse suffers a bloody, broken leg which prohibits him from escaping when the bad guys roll in.

Burnett and Stackhouse have their plane destroyed, though both manage to escape and parachute to earth. Violent content: War violence is rampant. By the end of the film, the young lieutenant learns to respect the distant, faceless global struggles he previously held in contempt. Local rebels offer kindness (a ride and a Coca-Cola) to Burnett while he’s on the run. Burnett risks his own life to retrieve photos proving that the army pursuing him is guilty of genocidal atrocities, in part to make sure his partner’s death was not in vain. One serviceman reminds a frustrated Burnett that “everybody has a role to play” in their mission. Positive elements: Reigart and others nobly put their safety and careers at risk to save a colleague. It’s a game of survival until help arrives, assuming Admiral Reigart can out-shank a political strategy that puts a pending peace treaty ahead of Burnett’s life.

On the snow-covered ground they must contend with a devious tracker, a ruthless secret police enforcer and a tenacious army equipped with heavy artillery. The bad guys fire heat-seeking missiles (I’ve never seen a movie get more mileage out of one plane going down) and the men eject. We’re not fighting we’re watching.” He’s about to walk away from the military when, during a final reconnaissance mission, Burnett and his pilot violate a no-fly zone and snap pictures of some things no one was meant to see. I didn’t want to be a cop walking a beat nobody cares about. Currently stationed on an aircraft carrier in the Adriatic Sea, he’s frustrated about policing skirmishes he can’t understand, and tells his commanding officer, “I signed up to be a fighter pilot.

Chris Burnett has spent seven years in the Navy waiting to see “real” military action. Adrenaline junkies who lack the attention span required for a cerebral thriller like Spy Game now have their own geopolitical actioner for the 2001 holiday season, the spastically filmed and frenetically edited Behind Enemy Lines.

Movie behind enemy lines