MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Dumbo’: Not Typical Vietnam War Film

As a pleasing family adventure-comedy, “Operation Dumbo Drop” is as familiar as its setting is unlikely: Vietnam, 1968. Even more unlikely, however, is that it was inspired by an actual incident in which some Green Berets delivered an elephant to a small village in the midst of war.

“Operation Dumbo Drop” is not about to displace such films as “The Deer Hunter,” “Platoon” and “Full Metal Jacket” as landmark depictions of the Vietnam War, but that is hardly its intention. Actually, its arrival couldn’t be more timely, with the normalizing of relations with Vietnam just 20 years after the war ended. Most everyone past adolescence will find the picture easily predictable, yet certainly a Vietnam War movie in which the Americans are persuasively admirable is a refreshing change of pace.

Ray Liotta’s cynical Capt. T.C. Doyle, a West Point graduate looking for action, arrives in a Montagnard village hard by the Ho Chi Minh Trail to take over a command from Danny Glover’s Capt. Sam Cahill, who respects the villagers and their culture. That includes a ceremonial ritual involving an elephant, who is regarded as sacred.

No sooner does Doyle espouse his by-the-book views than a contingent from the North Vietnamese Army kills the elephant as punishment to the villagers for their cooperation with the Americans, who are there to protect them from the NVA and the Viet Cong. A sensitive, humane man, Cahill pledges to the village elder that he and his men will replace the elephant.

Any grown-up--and many children, too--could tell you that the profoundly reluctant Doyle will join forces with Cahill, as will three other Green Berets--Doug E. Doug’s superstitious H.A., Corin Nemec’s farm boy Farley and Denis Leary’s con man Lt. Poole, who’s just the guy who can produce a new elephant with little more than a snap of his fingers. The village elder forces the men to take along an elephant boy, the hostile, anti-American Linh (12-year-old Dinh Thien Le) on their quest for a replacement elephant.

Of course, this group’s 200-mile journey back to the village with the new animal will be fraught with incidents both perilous and amusing; of course, everyone will shape up and honor Cahill’s commitment to the village.

Although this is the least violent and bloody Vietnam War movie you are ever likely to see, “Operation Dumbo Drop,” handsomely photographed by Russell Boyd, does not downplay the danger of Cahill’s mission. More important, writers Gene Quintano and Jim Kouf, in adapting a story by Jim Morris, don’t skirt the seeming folly of Cahill’s odyssey and do illuminate its significance.

There’s a linchpin scene, crucial to making the entire film work, when Cahill accuses Doyle of a lack of moral consciousness in regard to the Vietnamese, and Doyle stunningly retorts that Cahill is in fact risking the lives of his men in transporting the elephant so that if and when he makes it back to the United States, he can arrive home with a clear conscience.

Under Simon Wincer’s brisk, efficient direction, Glover, Liotta, Leary, et al., give the kind of full-bodied portrayals essential to making basically formulaic material come alive. It’s no small feat to pull off a traditional comedy in the context of the Vietnam War, which lends itself so much more easily to the freewheeling, absurdist humor of “Good Morning, Vietnam.”

* MPAA rating: PG, for war action and language. Times guidelines: Although this is a family film it is too intense for the very young.

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‘Operation Dumbo Drop’ Danny Glover: Sam Cahill Ray Liotta: Captain Doyle Denis Leary: David Poole Doug E. Doug: Harvey Ashford Corin Nemec: Lawrence Farley Dinh Thien Le: Linh A Buena Vista release of a Walt Disney Pictures presentation of an Interscope Communications production in association with Polygram Filmed Entertainment. Director Simon Wincer. Producers Diane Nabatoff and David Madden. Executive producers Ted Field and Robert W. Cort. Screenplay by Gene Quintano and Jim Kouf; based on the story by Jim Morris, Major, U.S. Army (Ret.). Cinematographer Russell Boyd. Editor O. Nicholas Brown. Costumes Rosanna Norton. Music David Newman. Production designer Paul Peters. Art directors Lisette Thomas, Steve Spence. Set decorator Jim Erickson. Running time: 1 hour, 42 minutes.

* In general release throughout Southern California.