... the stars of this show are the special-effects people... It's enough to keep one watching despite a want of interest in whether the surgery under way in the west wing will be carried through successfully...

Overall, Uncommon Valor (UV) is a less-flashy atypical Hollywood movie of ex-soldiers being reunited to form a team to rescue Vietnam POWs, using good (but not Oscar quality) humor, and decent near-realistic (but not memorable) special effects to tell a 2-part story of forming a rescue team which then performs their mission. Decades after UV was produced, one could say that it's just another run-of-the-mill movie about rescuing Vietnam POWs; however, this was one of the earlier movies of this genre so I don't think it can be fairly compared with the rest of this ilk. (E.g. Missing In Action was 1985 and the 2nd Rambo movie was 1986.) UV isn't a typical Hollywood attempt at making a blockbuster, yet it did very well in the theater. UV is noteworthy for being more emotional than its brethren; it's not a tear-jerker, nor is it a masterpiece drama since it is a bit light-hearted in many places and uses humor liberally. (The humor isn't comedy per se, I felt that its purpose is to reminder us that the characters are misfits and has-beens, ex-soldiers but not ex-warriors, and they're transitioning from plain vanilla real lives to what's normally reserved for elite teams of soldiers like Delta Force. UV has a charm about it that most others lack. The acting isn't superb, but it's still very good. It doesn't have tons of eye-candy special effects, but it does use them fairly appr…

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