Just perfect...

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The American military is perhaps the most bloated organization in the United States. When it is used to fight wars, there is no finer in the world. Unfortunately, when not fighting, the Officers and senior staff are anything but. In this film Director Richard Benjamin takes a realistic look at the brainless system by which the Military waste's taxpayer's money. The weapons they choose are hardly ever chosen for their effectiveness or safety. Indeed, they are neither given a hard, fixed budget which they cannot cross. Instead they are allowed to splurge to their heart's content. This film is a case in point. The military decides to create a new troop carrier. They call it the Bradley Fighting unit. Kelsey Grammar plays Maj. Gen. Partridge a man who couldn't care less what a vehicle costs, so long as it promotes jobs and his career. However, Congress puts Lt. Col. James Burton (Cary Elwes) in charge of making the vehicle safe. Viola Davis, plays Sgt. Fanning Burton's secretary and together they seek to carry out their orders. John C. McGinley and Tom Wright are there to insure that they fail. Richard Schiff plays Gen. Smith who bends over backwards to please Partridge and the brass hats. Richard Benjamin is Secretary of Defense who is ambivalent about the entire project. The movie is a running commentary about how things really go on behind doors. Failure to play the game results in no promotion, recognition or cushy job after military discharge. Fighting a losing battle Col. Burton nevertheless tries to built a safe vehicle and one sympathies with him, but while no one on the hill cares, it is the fighting man in combat who will ultimately pay the price. A must see film for anyone who does give a dam. ****

As an adaptation from Lt. Col. James G. Burton's 1993 book of the same name, 'The Pentaton Wars' dramatises the ludicrous time/money wasting going on in the many Pentagon weapons programmes during the cold war.The film focuses on the development of the M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Burton (an U.S. Air Force Lt. Col played by Cary Elwes) is appointed, by Congress, to test and evaluate the vehicle that has been under development by the U.S. Army for 17 years at a cost of $14 billion. The press has caught onto the astonishing waste and incompetence, and pressure is applied to prove that the whole thing isn't just throwing away vast quantities of money. Politicians, sensitive to the press coverage, begin to insist that some of these weapons programmes actually go into production, rather than just sitting around on the drawing board and testing grounds.The General in charge of the programme (played by Kelsey Grammar) is superficially friendly and cooperative to Burton, but his main aim is to stall and divert him into doing nothing to interfere with the gravy train -- just as so many previous appointees have avoided doing in the past, to the benefit of their careers. No-one wants to sabotage a hugely lucrative programme and find themselves ostracised.Burton, though, has other ideas. After observing a deeply flawed test of the vehicle he begins to dig deeper. He looks into the history of the programme and finds designers being constantly asked to redesign it to fit in with ever shifting fads. The vehicle started out as a troop carrier, until one General realised he could chop a big chunk out of his budget by merging his "scout" project with it -- meaning it now had to have guns, a turret, detection equipment and be twice as fast (meaning it carries half as many people with less armour to protect them)... and so on. At one point, another General even suggests making it amphibious. After the 17 years of this, the end result is a hideous mongrel that can't perform any role particularly well.Burton's investigations into the testing methods of the programme are no more encouraging. The "successful" tests performed on the armour are supposed to have been done with Soviet weaponry, but were actually done with Romanian RPGs that can't even blast through a metal door ("Romania is part of the Soviet-block" is the excuse). Other tests of its resistance to fire after being hit are done when the gunpowder in the carried ammo is replaced by sand, and the fuel tank is either empty or full of water. A British Army report into the type of aluminium used for the vehicle (when hit by a shell it burns and releases a toxic gas) is buried. Burton's attempts to run his own tests are constantly undermined and sabotaged. In one of the film's finest moments, Burton's idea to use sheep to test what would happen to a crew when hit by an RPG is blocked by the General setting up an ENTIRE NEW DEPARTMENT called "Ruminant procurement", thereby ensuring it will take 8 months for Burton's spec to be examined (type of sheep, length of coat, gender etc etc) and a further 8 months to actually procure them. Meanwhile, the under-pressure General is forcing the vehicle into production despite its manifest failings.The whole thing is played for laughs... there was no other way to treat it really. I haven't read the original book (but I will now), so I can't say how faithful it is, but it's a very smart and funny film. Anyone who has worked in a large organisation will be familiar with the goings-on... but only colossally budgeted ones like the military can take it to such comedic extremes.

I find it interesting that this movie is classified as a comedy, granted some of the procedures that Col. Burton is forced to go through are comical. What i find disturbing is this is based on the real true to life development of the bradley fighting vehicle. Not only was it produced at great cost (over 13 billion taxpayer dollars) but after spending that much money it was an unsafe deathtrap for anyone riding in it, unfortunately it was a troop carrier. thankfully we did not have any conflicts requiring the use of the vehicle until most of the defects were fixed. also disturbing is the fact that every officer involved in the development of the bradley was promoted and went on to lucrative defense contracting positions while Col. Burton was forced to leave the Air Force.

This movie could have been good to watch on a big screen. The humor is good, the dialogues are fine and the actors never overact. General Partridge (Kelsey Grammer) forgets that the business of war begins with providing good material to the troops. Colonel James Burton (Cary Elwes) knows this and he delivers a speech to the test-company that must make a demonstration of the Bradley troop transporter. The senatorial commission cannot understand that the development costs of the vehicle lasted for 17 years and costed 14 billion dollars. The hearings and questions of that commission provides one of the most humoristic scenes of the movie and are unsurpassed by other political movies.