Fridae

I used to think there's nothing more misguided than a Hollywood liberal but I've been proven wrong recently. There's nothing more misguided than an underinformed Hollywood liberal who decides to take on a Big International Cause and makes a film that is fundamentally underinformed and wrong – but just slightly more informed than the famously underinformed, geopolitically-challenged American viewer.

Angelina Jolie's Big Cause in this film is to inform the American audience of the war crimes committed during the 1991–95 Yugoslavian civil war that eventually tore the country apart. Perhaps leveraging on the white liberal guilt about the average American's non-interest during the actual war and the very, very late intervention of Bill Clinton and NATO in the war, In the Land of Blood and Honey is a film that catalogues all the war crimes that took place during that period – or it will have you believe, as Angelina Jolie may genuinely believe herself.

In the course of this film, you will be subjected to many scenes depicting Bosnian Muslim women taken as sex slaves by the Serbian Christian paramilitary and brutally raped. You will see many mass executions of innocent civilians in unmarked graves, again at the hands of the Bosnian/Serbian forces. As a fair and balanced film, there will be instances where these cardboard evil military types take the time to tell you how their grandparents were all brutalised, tortured, and murdered during WW2 by the Bosnians. It's supposed to be fair and balanced and humanising but it just makes the Serbian army all the more evil.

In between all this hardgoing stuff, you will be treated to a Romeo-and-Juliet style love affair between a Serbian captain and a Bosnian artist. Their love is mostly pure and chaste, despite him not interfering with the other rapes in his camp and her being a slave in his camp. The tone of their subplot feels jarringly, even comically at odds with the rest of the film because it's extremely unreal, in incredibly bad taste, and blatantly insulting to the intelligence of the audience.

Now, most of the world stood still and looked away uncomfortably during the Yugoslavian war because 'ethnic cleansing' and war crimes were committed on all sides, with the Serbs cleansing the Bosnians in Bosnia, the Croats cleansing the Serbs in Croatia and so on. A list of war criminals prosecuted by the ICC is testament to the free-for-all that existed then. Angelina Jolie has backed the wrong dog in this fight, making a misguided film that is both intellectually and emotionally dishonest and very uncomfortable to watch for all the wrong reasons. Sadly, the less you know about the Yugoslavian war, the more you might be impressed with Jolie's intentions and presentation of the 'facts'.