VALIANT ONE - Mark Reviews Movies

Valiant One, Briarcliff Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 30, 2025

A group of American soldiers ends up in hostile territory in Valiant One. It's an old and familiar setup, and co-writer/director Steve Barnett doesn't do nearly enough with it to make the movie unique or particularly interesting.

Indeed, there really is nothing new here, in terms of the plot, the characters, the enemies, or the political undercurrent driving it all. The only element of some note, perhaps, is that Barnett and Eric Tipton's screenplay doesn't attempt to obscure some real or invent some fictional foreign threat for our military protagonists. No, the squad here is based in South Korea, and during a routine mission, their helicopter crashes in North Korea. It's difficult to imagine this on-the-cheap actioner causing some sort of international incident, obviously, but for as anonymous and clichéd as the bad guys are in this movie, they might as well be from Villainvania or something like that.

Our heroes aren't much better in the character department, to be fair. A good number of them are expendable, of course, because the premise needs to have some stakes and complications for what might otherwise be a simple hike to the border. The characters who receive the most attention feel pretty disposable, too.

The main figure is Capt. Edward Brockman (Chase Stokes), who's jokey and just questioning enough of authority to stay on the right side of insubordination. He's not even supposed to be there this day, Brockman complains at one point while wandering through the North Korean forest after some of his comrades have died, so at least his priorities are a bit screwy, too.

Brockman is assigned to accompany a tech company executive named Josh (Desmin Borges) to check on some equipment near the Demilitarized Zone between the two countries. It's a kind of underground radar of sorts, which might seem like a throwaway detail and a vague excuse for the plot to happen, but to Barnett and Tipton's semi-credit, the screenplay doesn't let a single setup go to waste—probably because there's so little else going on in the script.

With a whole squad, Brockman helps Josh inspect the technology, but a severe storm approaches, causing the military to pull the plug on the mission. Once the helicopter takes off, though, the storm hits, sending the damaged chopper down on the wrong side of the DMZ. By coincidence, the only survivors are the characters who have spoken more than two lines before the crash.

They're soldiers Selby (Lana Condor) and Lee (Daniel Jun), and as one might have guessed based on his surname, there's plenty of "humor" revolving around the fact that Lee is of Korean heritage. Brockman, who is made team leader by the doomed man who formerly had that job, assumes his colleague can speak Korean when they're confronted by a local farmer with a rifle. This somehow becomes something of a running joke, even though Lee makes it pretty clear and plain that he only knows a few words of the language—none of them helpful for tense, armed standoffs.

Most of this comes down to repeated scenes of the soldiers hiding from North Korean soldiers in various locations—behind trees, in the farmer's barn, under the floorboards of a house, in a long expanse of tunnel that only goes two ways but still somehow confuses our heroes and surprises them when have a 50-50 chance of picking the right direction. With "tensions high" between North Korea and the United States for some specific but unmentioned reason, the squad has to avoid any direct confrontation.

Because this is an action movie, that plan doesn't last for long, and because the whole setup is just an excuse for those suspense sequences and several shootouts, nobody here even considers what kind of mess they might be making in the bigger picture. The movie's geopolitical insight is even more limited than its aims as a generic actioner. Obviously, we don't need that kind of information, but on the flip side, the filmmakers didn't need to set themselves up for that kind of criticism by actually using a real country as its generic villain.

The bigger and more pertinent issue with Valiant One, though, is that it is repetitive, has a shallow view of everything within it, and features characters who are both thinly developed (A pair of them get monologues to explain some back story, and even the characters within the movie find those histories to be predictable) and seem to make every bad decision available to them. It's little surprise, then, that the team does literally choose the wrong direction at one key moment. Even so, it's still kind of a shock that they're so unthinking as to forget that was a distinct possibility.

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