If you’re sick of military flicks that extol heroism and martial valor, you might prefer The Six Triple Eight .  Here’s a woke Netflix film that instead focuses on grievance politics.  Sure, the protagonist Lena expresses a desire to fight Hitler a few times, and putatively,  the enemy in WWII is Germany. But never mind that, the real enemy are the White racists in our own military. 

Their mission is to deliver airplane hangar loads of undelivered mail, a job that apparently no one else wants, and the Army doesn’t really believe they can accomplish.  For some unexplained reason, we are to believe that the higher ups actually want them to fail in this task–if only to show the malevolence of White males.

The movie is really about the racism they face as they embark on this mail delivering assignment, a job they find both insulting and challenging at the same time.

That White racism becomes a kind of caricature in the person of Dean Norris of Breaking Bad fame.  As a Kamala Harris supporter, Norris presumably took this role to express his White guilt.  As far as demonizing Southern officers circa World War II, I guess he does a good job.

The good white characters are Eleanor Roosevelt (of course) and FDR himself.  And then there’s Lena’s Jewish boyfriend who triggers everyone by dating a black girl; but hey, she’s pretty hot so we get it. 

Throughout the film Lena’s lost love is a point of anguish for her and a touchy subject amongst her comrades.  However, there isn’t much on display in the chemistry between the two in the beginning of the film to sell this notion that she is thus heartbroken.  She explains to her new suitor in the military:

“I'm still so scattered in my head and my heart about somebody that I lost.”

I agree that her acting performance is scattered, which is only made skilled in comparison to her suitor who is about as wooden as could be.  You don’t believe he loves her either. At any rate, he left his fiance because of his purported feelings of infatuation for Lena.  Meanwhile, the best she can offer is “friendship.”  But hey that’s something, keep trying my brother.

But this wooden performance is part of what makes The Six Triple Eight seem so inauthentic and almost astroturfed, so lacking in real pathos, but instead adhering to very modern bromides about race.

A trope in the film is the idea that the gals in The Six Triple Eight need to work twice as hard as everyone else to get the same recognition. This is a familiar refrain because we still hear it from aggrieved minorities, presented without evidence.  

Perhaps the best scene is when the unit unwinds and has a party in which they have a jazz band and some wild dancing.  This is one element of Black Culture from the mid 20th century that we might feel something nostalgia for as compared to the music on offer today.  Jazz is said to be a black artform, although nowadays it sounds rather quaint– at the time Joseph Goebbels referred to it as “N-word” music.

Finally, at this party Captain Charity Adams can loosen up a bit from her usual austere, but not unattractive bearing.  You might say that Adams, played by Kerry Washington, steals the show, as a stickler for Army rules and a complainer of discriminatory treatment.

At least she has some personality, although I could do without her constant boss girl imitation of a military commander. Indeed, I suffered listening to her trying to sound tough, which apparently was important for Tyler Perry to get across. But ultimately, it feels like they’re trying too hard to present the archetype of the no-nonsense captain and drill sergeant.

This is no Band of Brothers, but if you like being yelled at for two hours, The Six Triple Eight is your flick. 

Grade: C-

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