Spectacular Buildup, Disappointing Payoff

Rating: 8/10 (14 June 2018)

Everyone talks about this movie like it's a classic -- and it is. But the strange thing about The Dirty Dozen is that all the great moments happen in the first two thirds of the movie. The training scenes and the arguments between the men are all much more suspenseful, dangerous, and realistic than anything that actually happens when they finally go into combat.
The one scene that always grabs me time after time is the scene where the super tough Major, played by Lee Marvin, bullies the big, simple guy (the one they call Posey) into attacking him with a knife. This scene is so real that it's like something out of Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men. It's the kind of thing just about every guy has seen or experienced in life, on the playground, in the locker room, wherever.
And yet as incredible as it is, what's the payoff? It's not as if Posey stabs Hitler at the end of the movie with a knife. The commando raid turns into a shambles, almost everyone gets killed, but there's no real explanation of what went wrong, or why, or whether the Dirty Dozen actually accomplished anything or not.
Maybe that's the point, but I still feel like the ending was a weak payoff for a movie with a spectacular buildup and great character development.