Werner Herzog’s first Hollywood-funded feature is, for him, an unusually straightforward, plot-driven affair. A reworking of his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, it tells the true story of Dieter Dengler, a German-born American fighter pilot shot down over Laos during the Vietnam war: captured, tortured and imprisoned, Dengler escaped into the jungle and was eventually rescued. Here, Dengler is played by the consistently interesting Christian Bale, becoming a man who, driven by an overweening desire to fly, embraces the role of all-American hero with all the verve of a foreigner, in a portrait whose nuances might have been more apparent had Bale adopted the German accent Dengler retained throughout his life.