HYENA ROAD
GALA D: Paul Gross. Canada. 120 min. Sep 14, 9:30 pm Roy Thomson Hall Sep 15, 1:30 pm TIFF Bell Lightbox 2. See listings. Rating: NN
There’s something to be said for Gross’s flag-waving cinema. The writer/director/actor behind Passchendaele has made it his business to honour our troops while most filmmakers would rather not wade in such murky waters.
The problem is that movies like Hyena Road value sweeping entertainment over honest storytelling. The film acknowledges political and moral quandaries in Canada’s peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan but then applies the most disingenuous tropes from old-school combat films and westerns to gloss over the grey areas.
Gross plays a wisecracking old owl of an intelligence officer who enlists a young sniper (Rossif Sutherland) to help him track down and recruit a legendary mujahid warrior (Neamat Arghandabi). They are on a convoluted mission that involves backroom dealings and tribal beefs while touring heated locales where insurgents seem to sprout like dandelions from the ground.
Gross does a decent job building a sense of what soldiers deal with while in harm’s way or even at base camp, where sewage is dumped in a nearby pond.
He’s no Kathryn Bigelow when it comes to the combat scenes, which are clumsy and loud. Then again, he’s not going for The Hurt Locker. Hyena Road is more like a maple syrupy version of American Sniper.
