When assessing the relative worth of an ostensible drama, the first and final test I apply is a question directed at my own limbic system: did the film move me in some way? I do not demand that the protagonists of films in this genre win my sympathy, necessarily, but I do ask that at least one of them somehow manipulate my emotions. If I fail to feel, I fail to appreciate.

Herzog's film reminds me of a pretty basic experiment I performed with a rat years ago as an undergraduate psychology major. Our cohort was required to train our respective rodents to perform certain actions--and avoid others--in order to earn themselves food pellets. An unstated but equally important objective was training oneself to care little for this living organism under one's power. Students unwilling to withhold sustenance from or apply an uncomfortable electric current to a recalcitrant rat were unable to complete the assignment.

Rescue Dawn makes it easy on the researcher-turned-critic by providing a central hero whose sufferings we can easily dismiss. Christian Bale plays Lieutenant Dieter Dengler as little more than a smart, sociable rat dropped into a dangerous maze from which he eventually manages to extricate himself. Beyond the facts of his marriage and a couple buddies who watch his back in the opening and close of the movie, Lieutenant Dengler carries few features that mark him as human. In fact, if it were not for his much more interesting fellow prisoners who compete for screen time during the middle of the tale--I particularly enjoyed the compromised psyche of Jeremy Davie's character--the inhumanity of the South Vietnamese guards would have been blunted altogether. Dengler shows no signs of fracturing under the various stresses of torture, malnutrition, and sleeping regularly with his limbs bound. He exits captivity with the same confidence he brought into it, only with guns in hand and less meat on his bones. (If you want to be touched by the spectacle of an emaciated Christian Bale, I highly recommend his much more moving performance in The Machinist (2004). Sure, his experience is difficult and he loses one of his pals to some pretty graphic violence, but nothing really registers on this character's gleeful visage. Unwavering bravery, lock picking skills, and facility with a gun alone do not a fully fleshed hero make. Give me someone: 1) uncertain of either his courage or sanity, 2) desperate to regain his family and friends, 3) surprised by his faltering heroism and nationalism--or the reverse, 4) determined to befriend the prison pariah, or perhaps someone 5) awakened to his latent artistic impulse and the creative possibilities presented by his malleable feces.

Give me something that makes me feel! This unflappable mannequin just won't do.