Guilty Pleasure

Rating: 6/10 (19 August 2008)

Yes, the ending is implausible. Yes, Stallone is insufferable. Yes, Bill Conti ripped off the Shostakovich Fifth. Still, while I would grow weary of watching VICTORY every month, I get a kick out of it (sorry!) every other year or so.
I'm a Yank who generally finds soccer ... uh, futbol about as interesting as Andy Warhol's EMPIRE. When VICTORY first came out in 1981, soccer was starting to boom as an amateur youth sport in the United States, and I really thought this rather benign and likable film would be more popular than it was. But subsequent viewings do reveal the film's strengths, including the excellent football scenes in the finale, and the solid on-screen presences of Caine and Von Sydow (despite the limitations of the script). And, let's face it, you want the Good Guys (and they were definitely the Good Guys) to kick ass on those arrogant, cheatin' Nazi bastards. (I'm anti-Nazi, not anti-German.) Maybe I've seen too many World War II movies, but when the spectators break out in the "Marseillaise," and storm the field yelling "Victoire!," my eyes grow moist.
I was not aware until I read IMDb that VICTORY was based on the 1961 Hungarian film TWO HALF TIMES IN HELL, which itself was based on the legendary "Death Match" involving the Ukranian FC Start team against a Luftwaffe eleven in 1942. (See "The Death Match" in Wikipedia.com). Sounds like the real thing would make a better film. But VICTORY, for all it's fairy-tale believability, is enjoyable enough.