the evil dozen

Rating: 1/10 (12 May 1999)

I've seen this movie several times. It really is a "man"-movie, tough and all. However its attitude is very disturbing. The allied soldiers are a bunch of crooks (were they??) who are sent to Europe to kill german officers and their wifes (!) at a recreation center. Well, someone who calls himself a soldier fights on the battlefield for one thing. I'm not saying the allies were not crooks, but the glorification of that is very perverse. After having read the book of german officer Otto Skorzeny (he freed Mussolini from a mountain retreat in an operation that would make Lee Marvin look like a first grader) "My command operations" I threw the dirty-dozen-tape into the garbage can. NOT because we are the "bad-guys" in this movie, but because the attitude of the movie is so very wrong. Real life Skorzeny gave out the order to his crew: "no shot is fired unless you hear ME shoot" and he did not use his gun during, e.g., the entire daredevil Mussolini-operation. That was how the "real-life-good-guys" handled these things. So maybe you can understand that the dirty-dozen-massacre-movie is in a way both very pathetic and evil.