LAST FRIDAY The Great Raid opened in theaters. The notices that greeted the film weren’t mixed; they were almost uniformly negative, as exhibited by the collection of reviews at Rotten Tomatoes. But these reviews are utterly misguided.

The movie begins with an abbreviated account of the Bataan Death March. It then tells three intertwined stories: the imprisonment of the American soldiers who survived the march and were incarcerated at the Japanese POW hellhole of Cabanatuan, the tale of the Filipino underground, and the rescue mission of the film’s title. It is a good movie with cinematic flaws. For instance, The Great Raid would have been improved by dropping one of the plot strands in order to focus the story and by having a script doctor scrub the dialogue. Nevertheless, the film tells an important story well. This story, as Henry Kissinger might say, has the additional advantage of being true. And moreover, this story is patriotic, inspirational, moving, and remarkably free of political correctness. The Great Raid is a movie out of joint with the times; perhaps this accounts for the critics’ blinkered reviews.