Of the many unintentional laughs in the long-forgotten Melanie Griffith vehicle Shining Through, the most telling takes place when the heroine, a devoted fan of wartime spy pictures, gets recruited for covert missions during WWII, and the war she enters looks just as cardboard-phony as the ones she's been watching. Coming after a rash of recent war films that emphasize authentic, you-are-there immediacy, Hart's War seems like the kind of movie she would have favored: a creaky back-lot tour through old chestnuts like 12 Angry Men, To Kill A Mockingbird, Stalag 17, The Dirty Dozen, and Spartacus. Based on John Katzenbach's novel, the story grafts an Old South courtroom drama into a WWII German-POW-camp drama, effectively doubling its tame platitudes on race, honor, duty, and sacrifice. In such a square moral universe, all the major characters are heading for either redemption or comeuppance, depending on the nature of their sins and virtues. But for a film with hardly a single original or memorable frame, Hart's War gets off to a compelling start, thanks mostly to its charismatic leads and an initial willingness to explore a few gray areas. Future star Colin Farrell, best known for carrying the little-seen Vietnam War melodrama Tigerland, plays an inexperienced young lieutenant whose father, a state senator, has kept him out of harm's way. While on a frivolous mission to the front lines in Belgium, he's ambushed by German soldiers, who lead him to coercive interrogation before transporting him to a heavily guarded POW camp in Bavaria. There, Farrell undergoes a debriefing session with top colonel Bruce Willis, who suspects he folded under torture and consequently assigns him to bunk with enlisted men instead of his fellow officers. When a black Tuskegee airman (Terrence Howard) is falsely accused of murdering a racist hick, Farrell, a former Yale law student, reluctantly defends him in a court-martial hearing presided over by Willis, whose sense of justice gets called into question. Director Gregory Hoblit (Primal Fear, Frequency) and his screenwriting team suggest that black men were fighting for liberties that weren't extended to them by their fellow soldiers, and even draw timid parallels to the more flagrant prejudices of the Nazis. But it doesn't take much dramatic courage to condemn racism and Nazism from the safe distance of the 21st century, especially when the issues are laid out in such broad, pat, agreeable terms. In its amalgam of classic Hollywood war movies and courtroom dramas, Hart's War takes the audience to a place that never existed in order to teach it a lesson it already knows.