I hate it

Rating: 1/10 (27 September 2007)

I absolutely hate this movie. It fits that the same director did "Kelly's Heroes," since both films are equally shallow, lame, and unintelligent. The big difference is that "Kelly's" doesn't try to take itself so seriously.
Richard Burton is just outright obnoxious with his I'm-so-in-control routine which grates from the beginning of the film to the very end. Clint Eastwood is almost equally irritating as the silent heavy. It doesn't help that he looks and acts exactly the same as he did in most every other film he made at this time. The story is unbelievable and predictable bad. Everything goes right for the good guys and nothing goes right for the bad guys. You've seen it all before: the bad guys send hails of bullets at the good guys and miss, but one blind salvo from a good guy and he hits his mark.
Or how about the scene where the good guys are making their getaway and destroy every single plane on a German airfield with a snow plow bus. Heck, with that kind of devastation, forget the A-Bomb. The Allies should have just concentrated on driving buses all over enemy territory. What is also laughable is the fact that Burton and his crew have to go through a complicated series of meticulous steps to get their mission to completion, and of course they go through each step like clockwork. It is as if they had the luxury of practicing the mission on location for months ahead of time, and the Nazis were gracious enough to allow them to become familiar with every square inch of the castle they are infiltrating.
Scenes that are suppose to be tense end up being laughable in their lack of special effect realism. For example, the scene where Burton is fighting a couple of Nazis atop a cable car would be hard enough to believe anyway, but the dated, obvious use of a studio film backdrop induces more eyerolling than it suspends disbelief.
Plot "twists" are so manipulated they appear to have been tacked on just for the sake of adding twists, and the most ridiculous is saved for the final scene. With everything Burton and crew had to go through, somehow they knew they would end up on a plane at the end with a traitor who would be pointing a generic automatic weapon at them, so, long before they even started the mission they filed the hammer off the gun!
Forget the painful absurdity of how they could be assured that that would be the weapon the traitor would use. By this point of the film, there has been such an accumulation of plot "twists" and lack of realism, Burton and Eastwood could have revealed they were really Martians visiting Earth to save mankind and I would not have been the least surprised to see them turn green and fly away. At any rate, I have no idea how this can be considered a ten by some here.
I'm proud to be the first IMDBer to give it a One. Did I mention I hate this movie?