Wildgänse II

This is a highly underated film. For those of you who love Hard action films , this is perfect. Peter Hunt gives the procedings a no frills, lean and mean pace. He brilliantly captures the tough World the characters live in. I loved the first film, this isn't as good but is entertaining enough. It is very much like 'Who dares Wins' in its uncinical approach to fast and heavy violence. The characters are not nice people so there is little love loss between them. Scott Glenn plays the lead Emotionless and I believe this is done on purpose.

I saw this film just once in the mid eighties immediately after it's release. For anyone mildly interested in the historical events of the 'cold war' era, it is an excellent example(without giving away any of the plot) of how the East and West used Hess as a pawn. Olivier as always, does a truly remarkable job portraying the latter day Hess. I could not imagine any other actor being able to portray him so convincingly, and with the usual attention Olivier paid to his visual appearance, he gives a first class performance which has remained in my memory some 17 years on. It left such a good impression on me that I have spent the last 15 years scanning the TV film pages for it - to no avail. Scott Glenn too returns a creditable performance, and Edward Fox steps into the shoes of Richard Burton quite seamlessly. Good story line for anyone with even a scant knowledge of modern history, and well directed. This film has never seemed to make it to the TV screens and I cannot understand why. Nor have I seen a video available in the UK. It is an excellent film, but probably not of much interest to the younger viewer who has no interest in the era and the history

So Wild Geese II, Nearly every review I have ever come across regarding this film has been very negative and to be honest from reading a lot of them I don't even think many had watched the movie to begin with...

The original Wild Geese - these days a Sunday afternoon guilty pleasure classic that when looked at objectively is actually a fairly routine action film with a join the dots script and pedestrian direction. What makes that film work I suspect for most people is the actual African location photography and seeing a lot of mainly washed-up actors hamming it up ridiculously to pay their bar tabs.

Wild Geese II is very different from that movie, new cast, mainly new crew and made nearly ten years later - Wild Geese II is more of a spy thriller than action film. It offers a much more intelligent script, Great location work in Cold War era Berlin and some genuine storyline surprises. One aspect of the film that I think it really shares with the original is that any of the main characters can get killed at any time although it is a bit more edgy this time around.

Another aspect - in this case bad unfortunately is seeing another washed-up actor hamming for the alcohol bills, Edward Fox in this case who is just plain awful here taking over from what would have been Richard Burton's role. He plays second fiddle here to Scott Glenn - at the time flavor of the month upcoming star to appeal to the American market. Glenn although usually good in other movies is positively catatonic here. The interesting thing is that bad as the two leads are they do not bring the film down as the rest of the cast is filled out with mainly good supporting actors - the standouts being Barbara Carerra in a pretty thankless role as the love interest, an actor who plays an IRA gunman and another actor who plays a British Sergeant-Major. Also Peter Hunt the director deserves credit for keeping the fairly convoluted story moving along at a brisk pace.

So overall not as dated as the original but still dated, better story and better direction but with a bad rep - I think this is an unusual case of a sequel surpassing the original but audiences seem unwilling to give it a chance probably because the first just wasn't that good to begin with.

Not good, but not too bad. Takes a while to get going, but then the action is pretty good. Ending is a bit lame, and unnecessary. The movie could have been ended 10-15 minutes earlier.

Richard Burton was to star in this sequel to the original Wild Geese, but he died before shooting started. Edward Fox was rushed in as his younger brother with a script change. The film was dedicated to Burton.

Probably a much better film could have been dedicated to Burton, I think he would have liked some Shakespearean production dedicated to him. Not that the first Wild Geese would ever rank among the great films of all time, but it was nicely done story about the comradeship of the military fraternity.

These guys headed by Fox and Scott Glenn aren't mercenaries, they're heist guys. And it's a who they're trying to heist not a what. The last prisoner in Spandau where all the surviving Nazis were contained, those who weren't hanged.

Sir Laurence Olivier takes out his mitteleuropa Albert Basserman accent for the last time to play Rudolf Hess, former Deputy Fuehrer of the Third Reich who escaped the hangman at Nuremberg because of insanity and the fact he'd flown to the UK and was captured there. He sat out World War II in a British jail while the Holocaust was going on. Hard to prove complicity in it in that situation.

Hess was a symbol to neo-Nazis everywhere, a last living reminder of Hitler's Germany. But the man himself was essentially a nobody. What he did do was attach himself early on to Adolph Hitler, served time in jail to him. As a faithful scribe he took down Hitler's prose in what later became Mein Kampf.

When Hitler came to power, he gave Hess a nice high falutin' title of Deputy Fuehrer, a reward for services rendered. But Hess was never in the inner circle of things and gradually moved farther and farther out of Hitler's orbit as he consolidated power in Germany.

So in 1941 poor Hess cooked up this whacko scheme to fly to the United Kingdom on his own to try and negotiate a separate peace. Of course when it was realized that he spoke for no one, the British clapped him jail. It was a sad pathetic attention getting gesture by a very mediocre man, shoved aside by those in power.

The premise of this story is that Glenn and Fox are hired to spring Hess out of Spandau so he could tell what he knew about Hitler to the world. The plot gets needlessly complicated as the Russians, the Palestinians, and the IRA all get involved.

Knowing what we know about Hess the question to all this is why bother?

Even Laurence Olivier doing a part by rote is better than most players giving their all. The rest of the cast just goes through the motions as Olivier does.

Not a great tribute film for Richard Burton.