Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)When you consider the source material, this adaptation from Sven Hassel's bestseller Wheels Of Terror (one of a series of more than 10 books) about a German Penal Regiment fighting their way through battle after battle on the Russian front, should have been better than it is. Instead of making a gritty war movie with amusing moments in the style of the book, they've turned it into a caper movie trying to get cheap laughs with little substance. The music is straight out of a "Carry-On..." film, and the comedy elements really don't work at all. The C grade cast just about manage to get from A to B in the script without giving any real meat to their characters, and the whole thing goes off like a damp squib. Which is a shame when you think this could have been a late 80's Cross Of Iron instead of the second rate Kelly's Heroes that it turned out. It's hard to believe this film was made *after* Platoon had revised the way war movies are made. The Misfit Brigade is like a throwback to the less-than-serious war movies of the 60's - no bad thing if it's done well, but it's not.
Oliver Reed and David Carradine only appear for a combined screen time of about 5 minutes, so having them at the head of the cast list is stretching things a bit. One bizarre factoid though is that the kid that played the young Russian soldier in Peckinpah's vastly superior Cross Of Iron is all grown up and cast as Sven Hassel, the author, here, although he's reduced to a mere face in the crowd with little or nothing to do for nearly the entire feature.
That's not to say the film's a waste of time. I didn't find it at all funny (although the slapstick score was obviously telling me where and when I should be laughing) but maybe I felt let down by the fact that I was expecting something a little different to what I got. It's certainly not a bad film, it's about 20 years too late for the niche market it was aiming for and as such it'll probably rot on video for the rest of its days.
Don't do what I did and expect a reasonable adaptation of a great rollercoaster ride of a book, if you do you'll be disappointed. It has its moments, but turning a blind eye to Germans fighting WW2 using East European post-1960 tanks is a bit harder to do when the film doesn't give you much in return. It's more of a curio than anything else. If you want to see the Germans at war watch Das Boot, Cross Of Iron, or All Quiet On The Western Front. If you want to see an old fashioned style WW2-set caper movie in the style of Kelly's Heroes or The Dirty Dozen (but nowhere near as good) then The Misfit Brigade might be what you're looking for. At least it's better than the TV movie sequels they made for The Dirty Dozen.
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