Valiant One instantly has one thing going for it as a modern war movie… it’s not set in the Middle East. No, these producers didn’t go to a random desert for their action flick, they went to Vancouver and pretended it was North Korea. Progress? Who knows?

The flick is about a team of US soldiers sent to the Korean DMZ to fix some monitors. But bad weather forces them down… in North Korea. Now they have to hump it back to the DMZ and to safety without getting captured. Not sure how they are going to willy nilly escape N. Korea when its own citizens can’t. But that’s not even the biggest dumb in the flick.

It’s opening sequence is pretty good… clearly a low budget film but they did ok with the helicopter crash and the actors are, for most part, pretty good. I did wonder why they didn’t scuttle what was left of the chopper though… but there I go outthinking a dumb movie.

And the longer these characters march through the jungle, the dumber their actions get. I’m no military expert, but I’d hope I’d be able to tell north from south if I was a trained soldier. And when not to shout at the backs of soldiers even if I thought they were the rescue team.

The military action scenes are pretty rote and repetitive… and also share a certain lack of believability. Even if the decisions were dumb earlier in the film, a good action scene can save the day. These did not.

One thing I enjoyed was Lana Condor from the To All the Boys Netflix movies. Apparently Lana Jean got tired of going all moon eyed over cute boys and joined the military. Who knew?!! The actress was solid as an army medic so the film gets credit for creative casting.

This is an earnest but very stupid film. It starts out well but gradually falls apart as one stupid decision leads to another. There’s nothing to really recommend it unless you want to watch Lana Condor in an action flick (where the rescue team is code-named Condor… har!).

Score: 69