THE one-man show “Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun” is destined to draw a viewership roughly as populous as its cast.
Ben McKenzie of “The O.C.” stars as the soldier in Trumbo’s high-school syllabus mainstay, a novel in which a WWI doughboy winds up a quadruple amputee who has lost every sense except touch. Trumbo’s dialogue is as subtle as a bayonet charge and as outdated, while McKenzie, alternately shouty and moany, is not the actor to pull it off.
The power of the book lay in its ability to plant the reader inside the soldier’s head as he recalls better days and protests the cruelty of war, but that effect is completely undone by the staginess of the treatment here.
Watching the film, I did manage to retain my empathy for the narrator, though: I was as desperate as he was to escape the situation I was in.
Running time: 77 minutes. Not rated (profanity). At the Quad, 34 W. 13th St.