Rapiniamo il Duce

Sometimes a movie leaves you with some thoughts to think about, the other times it leaves you with nothing, as if you've never watched a movie at all. Rapiniamo il Duce is sadly closer to the latter but not without its buts too.

Ever since I started learning Italian, their movies were mostly misses for me; it's an expressive language and for the most part I just couldn't grab what the characters are saying - and I was just reading the subtitles! - but this one was different. Maybe because it was produced for Netflix but I just didn't feel like it was really made for Italians and that's on the negative side actually. The whole movie seems like an American remake but with an all-Italian cast and that dissonance is palpable starting the first minutes.

On the positive side though Rapiniamo il Duce is a stylish, fast-paced heist drama with fantastic inclusions of animated segments and 1940s appropriate soundtrack but it lacks consistency and the setting (last days of WWII) is only there to bring a feeling of urgency into narrative, not to be a leading vehicle for it. Main characters are no names that we know little to nothing about and therefore are not capable to empathize with anyone - the story plays out so fast it hasn't got time to draw backstories longer than a sentence or a five second clip and that rush is all over the place. The jokes would've been a well-fitting addition and probably the life saver for the movie but they don't exist here as well.

All in all this is a well-crafted movie that looks marvelous on paper, as a comic book adaptation but as a standalone feature it is as lifeless as its main characters.

As soon as you hear one of the female protagonists singing Paint it Black, you know or should know your leg is being pulled. Gag piles on gag as the story moves from silly to ridiculous. The acting is almost as bad as the dubbing. There have been countless films, maybe not countless, that poke fun at the tropes of war from courage to heroic. I think of Kelly's Heroes for example. Not so much as witty as it is laughable. Need to toss away ninety minutes with little to recall or clog up your grey matter, you have found it here. I didn't recognize any of the actors, and should I see them again, I doubt I would be able to recall any of them.

This is, in many ways, Renato De Maria's Italian version of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. It is a historically based piece of film fiction where the premise involves the use of Mussolini and the Italian Fascists as the basis for the story. A group of men discover a plan by Mussolini to flee Italy with his his country's riches as the war is coming to a close. The plot is to steal the gold and escape pic h and free men. The movie is well scripted, shot, and directed. The cinematography and costumes are very good. The acting is good. Matilda de Angelis, the star of HBO's The Undoing, is very good in this. The film is good and I love that so many war films focus on Germany and Hitler, but this one uses Mussolini and the Italians as a focal point. While it is good, it is not as compelling, well filmed, or well scripted as a Tarantino film. That is okay. Many films do not.

The quality of the cinematics is good and the historical details too. The faces all match the characters and the acting is good - all but for Castellitto Jr who is kind of unwatchable so bad he is this spoiled brat!

The best character who made the movie interesting is Maccio's.

The best acting is that of the fascist general, who is a new face for me in Italian cinema, but very interesting.

The song arrangements were also good and, let's say, 'innovative classics'!

A bit predictable development and ending, but still better than the usual action hollywood movies of the past 15 years.

I feel that there are excess of Nazi based movies in the history of cinema and too few Fascist based movies because of one big reason: with the Nazis, hollywood can show Americans fighting evil, but with Fascist they would have to acknowledge the big role of Socialist freedom fighters! Usual obscurantist hypocrisy.

There's nothing so wrong with this movie that it ever becomes unwatchable, but there isn't really a good reason to watch it, either. It starts off fine, but as it went on, I became increasingly restless. The number of derivative and predictable plot elements really started to pile up, and the pacing felt off.

The worst part, I thought, was that they didn't really do much with the premise. This is an Italian movie set during the end of World War II, and they barely even used that setup. It could have been set in the United States during the Civil War or Prohibition, and there probably wouldn't need to be many changes.

The characters were likeable, though, and it hits all the notes that you expect a heist comedy to hit.