Metacritic reviews

A war film is a war film is a war film... except that Siegel, brought into the project at the last moment when Steve McQueen refused to work with the scheduled director, toughened the standard war-is-hell screenplay into an extraordinary study of psychopathology.

An unusually well-made film.

A film with uncomfortable things to say about the nature of heroism--and one to see for that reason.

Thanks in part to McQueen, you can almost mention this in the same breath with director Don Siegel's best. [30 Mar 1990, p.3D]

Siegel avoids the cliches of the butterflies-and-brotherhood school (cf All Quiet on the Western Front), opting instead for a study of the brutalizing power of sanctioned violence.

Producer Henry Blanke has framed and mounted a gripping, fast-paced, hard-hitting dramatic portrait of an interesting World War II battlefield incident. But there are occasional duds in the film's dramatic arsenal.