Doesn't deliver much in action or in character development

Rating: 4/10 (10 January 2020)

Saw this on January 9 in the theater. I was eager to see it, having seen many, not all, war movies, including recently the much-better film Midway.
A quick review of the plot: During the World War, two British corporals are assigned to travel, by foot, through German territory to bring to a colonel, orders to halt an attack that is to begin tomorrow at dawn on April 7, 1917. Almost the entirety of the film deals with soldiers talking as they pass through all sorts of scenery trying to get to the place to deliver the message. They converse, go through abandoned German trenches, encounter numerous rats and dead bodies and occasionally live people, including a fighter pilot they see shot down in a dogfight. If you're looking for great wartime action scenes, look elsewhere.
That's really about it. We get to know a tiny bit about the two lead characters, virtually nothing about anyone else. There are plentiful scenes involving soldiers walking and breathing heavily, many dizzifying scenes where the camera pans around a room or an outside scene. I know someone who is sensitive to even TV shows where the camera pans around and believe she would have had real problems with those oft repeated movements during this film.
As one reviewer noted, there are many cliche moments in this film, the kinds of things you seem to get in almost every war movie. There are, as others have pointed out, many things that seem highly implausible or unrealistic.
Now I loved the TV series Combat, and they definitely had an episode or two that bore a strong resemblance to what this film presents. Only Combat did it in a 50-minute (minus commercials) presentation. Picture this as a three-part Combat. It just seemed to drag along, the same plot, just extended over two full hours.
For soldiers in a hurry to get somewhere to deliver a certain message to save the lives of thousands by calling off an attack, our heroes seemed to pause ever five minutes to do things they need not do. They also seemed to veer off course repeatedly, to go through every building close to their route. I kept wanting to call out, "Quit stopping for tea (actually a milk break) or to look through every building within sight. Just carry on with your mission!"
Since this is a fictional film, we viewers are not even learning about an actual World War I battle, nor about the lives of real people. It was a visually stimulating film in terms of the bleak shots of battlefields and trenches and such. But I was just left with a sort-of empty feeling as it was concluding, like, "So that's all there is to this?"
Had it been made in the early 80s, with an "R" rating, I imagine I would have heard some mild obscenities (of which we had many here) and a couple of F bombs. Since we are so much more sophisticated today, they must have had at least 65 uses of the "F" word, including one non-com who must have used over a dozen in his 2 minutes of screen time. Note to movie producers: You can make a realistic, earthy film without having to weakly resort to cussing nearly as often as this film does. They used to talk about "gratuitous sex"...this film truly had gratuitous cussing. It didn't advance the plot or develop the characters, it was just there for no purpose.
I think my rating of 4 is accurate.