Roger L. Simon watches Paul Haggis' In The Valley of Elah so you don't have to:

I came to this movie – the tale of a retired military policeman (Tommy Lee Jones) in search of the murderers of his son, who had gone AWOL on return from Iraq - expecting to be put off by its antiwar message. But I was even more put off by the ineptitude of the film itself, especially the screenplay. Simply as a mystery, it’s worse than a mediocre episode of the Rockford Files. Much of the movie is taken up with a red herring about drug dealing so obvious (and so out of an old TV show) that they might as well have had flashing neon of a red fish on the screen. The rest mostly shows Jones moaning and groaning about his dead son with Susan Sarandon and a ‘de-glammed’ Charlize Theron. The acting is good enough, I suppose, but not nearly sufficient to overcome the banal plot.

The whole enterprise was soporific and my mind kept wandering, only to be pulled back intermittently by intense antiwar screeds given, completely out of context, by various characters, as if we were suddenly plunged into a clumsy agitprop flick produced by the cultural ministry of some former communist country (Albania?). The writer-director apparently did not trust his own story to make his point, although, at the end, it is no more than the old chestnut “War is Hell” with a special (and entirely predictable) anti-American military fillip. And, for those still awake… and with IQs under triple digits… who could possibly miss the import of this fillip, Haggis hammers it home with a metaphor more ham-handed than any I can remember in recent cinema. He has the formerly patriotic Jones solemnly raise the American flag upside down over his hometown – the last image of the movie.

Although this puerile melodramatic gesture has been commented on in many reviews, few have actually seen it in the theatres. Like the rest of the current crop of antiwar films, the audience stayed away in droves.

But what fascinates me in this is not the audience disinterest in these turgid antiwar flicks. That was as predictable as the message of the films themselves. What interests me is what happened to the talented Haggis. Where did his skill go? Why did he make – let’s be honest – such an atrocious film out of this material (originally a ‘true story’ article in Playboy which he, apparently loosely, adapted)?