***Comic book “men on a mission” WW2 adventure with a great cast and lots of action***
Major Mallory and Sgt. Miller (Robert Shaw and Edward Fox) from “The Guns of Navarone” (1961) are commissioned to Yugoslavia to find & eliminate the German spy who tried to sabotage their mission at Navarone (Franco Nero). To get there, they have to join with an American unit on a covert mission to blow up a bridge. Harrison Ford plays the leader of the operation while Carl Weathers plays a sergeant escaping the MPs, a last minute addition. Barbara Bach and Richard Kiel show up later.
"Force 10 from Navarone” (1978) is the McDonalds equivalent of the first movie. This doesn’t mean it’s necessarily bad (after all, McDonalds ain’t bad), just that it lacks the class of its predecessor and trades it in for cartoonish writing and loads of action. It’s sort of a mixture of the first film with "Where Eagles Dare" (1968) and “Hornets’ Nest” (1970), but with a wildly comic book tone à la “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981), albeit less goofy and not as proficient. The cast is great, though, and the locations are to die for. It’s just that the writing is glaringly juvenile.
FYI: This was Robert Shaw's second to last movie; he died of a heart attack three months before release at the too-young age of 51.
The film runs 1 hour, 58 minutes, and was mostly shot in the former Yugoslavia (e.g. Durdevica Tara Bridge on Tara River, Montenegro; and Jablanica Dam, Jablanicko Lake, Bosnia and Herzegovina).
GRADE: B-
