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WRITTEN BY

VALIANT ONE (2025)

MPAA: R.
Release Date: 01/31/25 [Cinemas]
Genre: Thriller.

Studio: Briarcliff Entertainment. 

"With tensions between North and South Korea, a US helicopter crashes on the North Korean side. Now the survivors must work together to protect a civilian tech specialist and find their way out without the help of US military support." 

OUR MOVIE REVIEW:

Leadership is a challenge, especially when thrust into chaos, and lives depend on the right choice made at the right time. An Army sergeant is forced to earn his stripes after a devastating accident leaves his superiors dead, forcing him to lead the remaining survivors to safety. His assignment: march across a foreign land with wounded and scared comrades to the rendezvous, where they will be rescued. His problem: they are Americans whose helicopter crash-landed inside North Korea, which is tantamount to an act of war.

 

The sergeant, named Brockman and played by Chase Stokes, is a soldier burdened by routine desk work. He’s not a combat soldier among the ranks of the infantry; he sits behind a keyboard aboard Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek, South Korea. Brockman gets the call to replace another soldier tasked to escort a civilian signals intelligence tech, Josh (Desmin Borges), to fix a ground penetrating radar (GPR) unit in the demilitarized zone (DMZ). Brockman smugly gears up, not happy with the situation but not overly concerned. He expects the whole situation to be finished in “about twenty minutes anyway,” he calmly tells Corporal Selby (Lana Condor). 

 

After arriving at the GPR site, a squad of soldiers pulls security as Josh attempts to fix the device. A surprise monsoon cuts the mission short, and the helicopter crashes down, killing most of the onboard troops. After Brockman gains consciousness, his rescue call is interrupted with very bad news. The survivors must trek to a far-off grid square before help can arrive, as they crashed inside North Korea. 

 

Steve Barnett, the writer-director, fashioned this story from an old high school buddy turned Navy Seal who experienced the same situation by surviving a crash in the DMZ. The crash survivors in that story were probably better trained to handle the wilderness, temperature, and trigger-happy North Korean soldiers. Sgt Brockman is not equipped for this line of work. He does not carry himself as a leader or as a hero. This fiction suggests that a hero can materialize under the proper conditions or die trying.

 

Brockman leads his troops through the woods and fields, eventually finding shelter in a farmhouse. Selby, the more disciplined soldier, coaches him out of earshot of everyone else on how to act. The whole affair is dictated by rank on the chest instead of fortitude and resolve. Selby is the more put-together soldier, but the movie makes Brockman take charge. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be growth. Narratively, this choice makes sense. Logically, making the lazy sergeant who can barely dress himself take point is frustrating.

 

Valiant One is one of the few films that suggests the tenuous geopolitical nature of North Korean affairs. These are articulated as fears of torture or death, and the North Korean troops the soldiers eventually fight come across as stock bad guys. We get impressions of high stakes, mainly by a heartlessly cruel act by one top North Korean soldier, which I won’t spoil here. 

 

The film whisks by in its tight 80-minute runtime. There is not a lot of story here; the film is an A-to-B survival tale. However, there is a lot of heart that we only get short glimpses of. The other two soldiers in Brockman’s group, Cpl Lee (Daniel Jun) and Cpl Ross (Jonathan Whitesell), carry the humor in sporadic moments. Lee has a tender moment with the young North Korean daughter during their stay in the farmhouse. 

 

This film has a good heart, and the intentions to display the hero’s journey are obvious. Valiant Hero was too hollow of an experience to yield a recommendation. The movie is saddled with trying hard to be too sentimental walking through a marsh of clichés. Sgt Brockman fighting North Korean soldiers through hell via a literal incursion tunnel to come out on the other side under bright skies as a hero was too on the nose. It is an unremarkable action movie, neither entertaining nor moving.

OUR VERDICT:

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