On Brian De Palma’s Redacted

Peter Bradshaw:

Perhaps without quite realising it, De Palma is applying his extensively developed idiom of slash, splatter and gore. After a while, Redacted starts to feel like a sort of politicised exploitation-horror picture. I am still not entirely sure if it is just the director’s default position for representing violence, or if the wayward genius in him senses that, in the era of Abu Ghraib, this is the truest way of representing the essentially grotesque nature of the military adventure in Iraq.