Les Douze Salopards III: Mission Mortelle

The second made-for-TV sequel to the classic Robert Aldrich WWII action film is minus Lee Marvin and brings back Telly Savalas to lead the dozen. Savalas, however, is not playing Archer Maggott from the first film, who was killed in the first film, but is a new Major who leads a new crew of condemned soldiers on a new suicide mission. This sequel is wholly unoriginal and is a low-rent clone of the original. "Train them! Excite them! Arm them!... Then turn them loose on the Nazis!" It's a solid formula, though, and what makes this TV movie work is the cast, which, besides Savalas, includes Hollywood veterans Ernest Borgnine (reprising his role from the original) and Vince Edwards, along with a fresh-faced Bo Svenson, Thom Mathews, Gary Graham, and best of all Randall "Tex" Cobb. For my money, Cobb steals every scene he's in playing a dimwitted hulk of a character named Swede. Also kind of fun is Wolf Kahler playing the main Nazi, which capitalized off of him playing the main Nazi in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. But generally speaking, this is merely a serviceable men-on-a-mission action flick where, despite bland action reminiscent of a typical A-TEAM episode, a solid cast makes the film worth watching for fans of this sort of flick.