Madeleine Stowe

Initially coming on a bit like a cross between Hitchcock's Rear Window and Porky's, Stakeout ends up falling between the two stools of mirth and suspense. Some half-amusing business involving a series of practical jokes between the cop duo and their relief partners doesn't add materially to the film. Emilio Estevez's sidekick role is under-developed and he brings to this none of the loose cannon mania he would later bring to Young Guns. Dreyfuss isn't entirely convincing as a tough, seasoned cop and Aidan Quinn as the villain comes across as a poor man's James Woods. Yet for all these flaws, director John Badham just about manages to cobble together a watchable caper.

On the DVD: Stakeout on disc has no extras of any kind, not even a trailer. T...

In place of the moral ambiguity offered by, say, Platoon or Hamburger Hill, We Were Soldiers presents us with archetypes. Gibson's family man colonel is almost a parody of Patton, a man with so much heart you wonder how he manages to get up in the morning. He's a good Catholic, loves his men, and tells us that he's the first one on the battlefield and the last one off. And if that self-eulogising wasn't enough we have the slow-mo, heavily scored last-one-into-the-helicopter moment to prove it. In uncomfortably jingoistic contrast, the commander of the Viet Cong never leaves his cavernous headquarters as he sends his faceless foot soldiers to their death.

What saves the film are Ryan Hurst's performance as the stoic Sergea...

On the DVD: The disc contains a theatrical trailer and several TV ads, with scroll-down filmographies of the major talents involved which are incomplete for some unknown reason. There's a brief and unenlightening five-minute documentary, with the principal cast plus the director, John Bai...