An average movie

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this flick but, since it was starring Clint Eastwood, I thought I might as well check it out. In fact, I already saw yesterday ‘Kelly’s Heroes’, Eastwood’s other WWII action flick. Well, while ‘Kelly’s Heroes’ was a fun and fairly entertaining flick, to be honest, this rather dreary and more serious action thriller didn’t really work for me though. For starters, I had a rather hard time to take it seriously as, even though the action was taking place in Germany, none of the characters did speak German, even the Nazis. To make things worse, some of the German characters did speak English with a strong accent but not all of them. Concerning Clint Eastwood, he made this movie only a few years after his breakthrough thanks to the Dollar trilogy with Sergio Leone, and it was one of the rare occurrences that he would not play the lead character. Indeed, he actually played second fiddle to Richard Burton who was actually pretty good here, by the way. I have to admit that I’m not really familiar with Burton’s work but he was rather convincing as a British officer passing for a German soldier (or maybe it was the over way around? Even Eastwood’s character seemed to be confused by all this at some point). On the other hand, Clint Eastwood was actually pretty weak here. Even if he was basically giving the same performance as in his classic Westerns, it did work fine in ‘Kelly’s Heroes’ and he basically tried the same gimmick here but, unfortunately, this time, it didn’t work at all. Seriously, I don’t think I have seen before such an unconvincing Allied soldier trying to pass for a Nazi officer. Concerning the rest of the movie, it was not bad but, like ‘Kelly’s Heroes’, it was just too long (I think it took them about 1 hour of running time to actually escape from this castle). Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, I have to admit that it was still a decent watch and it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre. 

6/10