Drawing on both his action-flick chops and his family background, Die Hard 2 director Renny Harlin battles his way back from straight-to-video purgatory with 5 Days of War. The low-budget movie, set during Russia's 2008 invasion of Georgia, is neither innovative nor profound, but it is kinetic, visceral and sometimes moving.
The story is largely based on eyewitness accounts collected by Human Rights Watch, and is best when it stays close to these anecdotes. Children and the elderly are callously targeted in the sort of wartime atrocities that have become something of a specialty for screenwriter Mikko Alanne. Alanne â?? like Harlin, a Finn â?? also wrote Pinkville, Oliver Stone's upcoming film about the My Lai massacre.
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