Critic Reviews

This uneven but well-researched film takes a much more sober and realistic view than the Rambo-esque capers, of the hardships endured by shot-down Americans in conditions that were anything but Hilton-like.

An earnest but clumsy tribute to the heroism of the American servicemen - mostly officers - who were captured and held prisoner by North Vietnam during the long, desperate undeclared war we now refer to simply as Vietnam.

The film's didactic passages cancel out its dramatic integrity, and the results are strangely neutral and unmoving.

This film is really blatant right-wing propaganda loaded with a stunning amount of racial and political stereotypes.

Chetwynd's design, to show the POW plight in terms as dreary as its reality, works against the movie at almost every point. [20 May 1987, p.D8]

Chetwynd fumbles the job badly. [2 May 1987]

The Hanoi Hilton is a lame attempt by writer-director Lionel Chetwynd to tell the story of US prisoners in Hoa Lo Prison, in Hanoi during the Vietnam War. Pic is a slanted view of traditional prison camp sagas, injecting lots of hindsight and taking right-wing potshots that do a disservice to the very human drama of the subject.

Lionel Chetwynd has achieved the impossible -- making a Vietnam prison torture movie dull. And although his sympathy for Americans missing in action seems genuine and laudable, the film liberal-bashes so heavyhandedly it's enough to make Nixon cry "Fonda."

Dull and unimaginative, Chetwynd treats his characters with such reverence that they might as well be saints in striped prison pajamas, martyred for the sake of some robotic patriotism. At least, his villains stand out from the host of underdeveloped heroes. Boob journalists, a doofus peacenik actress and a Cuban goon -- Michael Russo, who seems to think he's playing a pimp on "Miami Vice" -- add the unintentional comic relief.

It's just another failed movie: a loud, shallow fiasco that leaves you feeling used.