A lot of the questions raised by the arrival of the new based-on-a-true-story film, “The Great Raid,” are more interesting than the film itself. Why, for instance, should a movie showing the Japanese as ruthless, murderous, even sadistic conquerors be released in the very week when the world is observing the 60th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

This movie is based on an amazing historical incident. After the fall of the Philippines in 1942, the American soldiers defending Bataan and Corregidor were put into what amounted to a Japanese death camp at Cabanatuan-and there they remained for three years, until a small group of Army Rangers crept some 30 miles behind the Japanese lines and liberated more than 500 of them. Only two Americans were killed, one Ranger and one prisoner. It remains the most successful rescue in U.S. military history.

The raid itself is excitingly filmed, but that is only the last 15 minutes of the film. The rest of it rather drags, caught somewhere between a fussily accurate historical reconstruction-including actors that look just like the real people they are playing-and an anachronistic projection backwards of the tough and ruthless posing of today’s tv-raised soldiers. The film doesn’t really work as an action picture, and as a character study, the verisimilitude imposed on the actors turns them into inexpressive blocks of wood. Rated R.

COURTESY PHOTO