Just walk slow, act dumb and look stupid.

Rating: 3/10 (17 May 2010)

"The Dirty Dozen" plays out as an increasingly perverse, puerile and pathetic male fantasy, taking us deeper and deeper into the twisted stupidity of a certain type of machismo which glorifies bullying, violence, misogyny and ego gratification in place of functional social relations. It achieves this quite efficiently, with a reasonable standard of acting and film-making. The first three quarters of the film could be defended as brainless fun for certain kinds of people, but the finale descends into an indefensible quagmire of incompetence which is even more offensive for its blasé justification of atrocity than for its utterly ludicrous depiction of military action. The patterns of male bonding and conflict depicted in the film are laughable in their combination of gratuitous nastiness and infantile naïveté.
Having no connection at all to the realities of the conflict depicted, the realities of conflict itself, nor the realities of any personal or cultural interaction at all may not make a "war movie" offensive in itself. However, when the result is as vacuous and idiotic as it is here, it can be argued that this sort of film insults anyone involved with or interested in any of the subjects it touches upon (hello "Inglourious Basterds"...).