Very good, however implausible

Rating: 8/10 (4 January 2013)

This is another one of those excellently-crafted movies you see sometimes which successfully romanticizes something that in reality would have been a very repellent business, and moreover does so in spite of a seriously implausible plot premise. As anybody with any experience with real screw-ups of the the variety featured in this movie knows, the chances of getting consistently constructive work, much less making useful members of team of much of the human material available here, and even under the least stressful of conditions, is right at about zero, and as true war history buffs know, the kinds of real-life efforts that inspired the raid that forms the basis of this offering have been manned and carried out without the need to descend the extreme depicted here.
That said, however, the American imagination, which has proved it can swallow anything from children's dolls possessed by evil spirits to Santa Claus alive and well and living in a Long Island retirement home (and even to any number of overwrought, incompetent buffoons seeking high office), can easily digest this one, and once it does you have a meticulously written narrative with excellent dialog expertly performed by an appealing cast led perfectly by Lee Marvin, who was just perfect in his role. I thought that apart from the plot premise the writing was so superb that it was a shame that the original premise was not altered somewhat to make it as believable as much of the rest of story and dialog are. Had it been, rather than one of the best Saturday afternoon military video fantasies ever, it could have had the potential to rank up there near Bridge on The River Kwai or Lawrence of Arabia as a true artistic achievement. Instead the whole thing comes off as something of a two-hour-long gag, one long, running smirk at authority more in the manner of a light parody rather than the depiction of reality, even with questioning of authority, that it could have been. In this sense I do not think it is fair at all to compare it to the much more reality-anchored Great Escape, for example.
All that said, this movie is at least one of the best rainy Saturday afternoon military video fantasies ever, and is still in the top 10% in that genre to this day, more than 40 years after it was made.