Review: Private Peaceful (12A)

Yet from the outset Private Peaceful emerges as a poorer cousin to War Horse with cut-price battle scenes letting down the multi-layered storyline of chaste love, class divide, sibling rivalry and the senseless waste of trench warfare.

Tommo and Charlie Peaceful are Devon brothers thrust into the madness of the First World War. The film is told largely in flashback as one of the brothers awaits the firing squad. The constant to-ing and fro-ing of the plot fatally undermines this modest picture which lacks focus. Some superb performers bolster the meagre budget, not least John Lynch as a by-the-book NCO who sees Charlie’s free thinker as a dangerous commodity.

The brothers’ personal conflict and the wider milieu in which they find themselves throw up loose comparisons with The Fighting 69th and Kubrick’s Paths of Glory but whilst they survive in Morpurgo’s novel they struggle to find a resonance in the film. Jack O’Connell and George MacKay are perfectly acceptable as the boys forced into adulthood amidst the mud and blood of a far-off war but the movie suffers from a Children’s Film Foundation feel and never truly hits the heights.