Courage Under Fire (6.4/10)

Courage Under Fire is a 1996 war thriller starring Denzel Washington, and it hasn't aged especially well. The premise is genuinely cool: an investigation where each witness's account of the same firefight contradicts the last, so you're constantly piecing together what really happened. Denzel is solid, and seeing Meg Ryan in a combat role is a real change from the rom-coms she's known for. The problem is the pacing. The movie drags a lot, and the interesting setup gets buried under long stretches that could have been tightened. "During the 1991 Gulf War, Lieutenant Colonel Nathaniel Serling (Denzel Washington) accidentally caused a friendly fire incident, a mistake that was hushed up by his superiors. Following the war, he is assigned to investigate the case of Army Captain Karen Walden (Meg Ryan), killed in action when her Medevac unit was attempting to rescue the crew of a downed helicopter. But, as Serling interviews the members of Walden's crew, he realizes their stories about the incident don't add up."