A real mess of a film - you can feel all the different hands in it. It sort of starts off paying homage to the original, showing clips from it, and the early scenes have banter between Robert Shaw, playing Gregory Peck, and Edward Fox, playing David Niven. It's really awful banter though both being stiff upper lip jolly good types, which is inconsistent with the original.
Then the film kind of forgets Fox and becomes about Shaw and Harrison Ford. Shaw and Fox are sent on a mission to kill a traitor in Yugoslavia, Ford is on a mission to blow up a bridge. There's some double cross and twists but none of it that interesting.
Carl Weathers comes along and characters comment on him being black, and he has an awful scene where he sooks because he's left out of the loop. You could cut his character. You could cut Fox's character too. Ford has the odd good moment but wasn't comfortable enough as a star to play himself. Shaw is okay - but character work is weak.
We know Franco Nero is bad so his betrayal is not a surprise. Barbara Bach livens things up with a bit of nudity - the film could have done with more of it. And more females. Guns had two - two romances. We don't even get one romance. It's very boys own. They should have made Carl Weathers a girl, maybe.
There's the occasional good bit - shooting Nero in a van, the final raid on the dam. But it's an underwhelming mess. George MacDonald Fraser did uncredited work on the script. I'm sure it was a hard gig, but he didn't save the say.
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