[link=/name/nm6675440]Lily-Rose Depp[/link], [link=/name/nm2864252]Mason Gooding[/link], and more stars who are on the rise in 2025.

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During WW2, after the 'ingenious' desertion of the German guards, the Allied prisoners of a POW camp decide to remain in the camp, some masquerading as German guards, in order to fool the frequent SS inspections.

Unsatisfying rubbish confused about its purpose

This Yorkshire TV made-for-telly movie is written by one of the most prolific Brit-com writers of all, David Nobbs. Maybe that&#39;s why it all seems to me like a 30-minute episode of a show that didn&#39;t know when to stop. There are definitely funny moments here, and Nobbs moves the plot along by putting mammoth twists in the plot about every 20 minutes. But honestly, an hour would have been plenty to put across this material. 100 minutes is excruciating. It&#39;s all played out, as someone else has mentioned, like Animal Farm meets Great Escape, with a few dashes of Hogan&#39;s Heroes for good measure. Stephen Fry and Geoffrey Palmer are quite good, as are some of the supporting cast. Fry is more or less reprising his character from Blackadder IV; the pompous officer who won&#39;t listen to anyone else. But be warned, this plot is thinned out almost as badly as soup in the Stalag.

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Stalag Luft

I watched this tonight and really didn&#39;t know what I was watching? Was it a comedy? I thought it was within the cast? It reminded me of the Casino Royale comedy film with Peter Sellers, who REALLY wanted to play his Bond role straight......but the directors didn&#39;t want him too! And he wasn&#39;t happy! This film is the same! I couldn&#39;t work it out, as the first half was somewhat of an ordeal and too much waffle, and I was trying to figure out what it was I was watching? Maybe it needed canned laughter? There are some brilliant moments! The Germans wanting to escape too and then the POW&#39;s changing their minds about escaping, and then not letting the Germans back in again! I can only agree with previous comments, but stay with it! It really does have its moments!

Spoilers throughout This film is, I believe to be a sort of cross between The Great Escape (Greatest film of all time) &amp; George Orwell&#39;s Animal Farm, an excellent novel, so it was always going to be difficult to make it good, but it manages it. It&#39;s a brilliant idea, hilarious, bordering on slapstick in one or two scenes, but if you watch it as a comedy in a lighthearted way, you&#39;ll enjoy it. You have the Allieds who are tunneling out &amp; the German guards , who once they realise, ask if they can come with the Allieds as they don&#39;t like it in there either! They in fact do. Then the suggestion (when looking for a place to dispose of all the excess earth that had been dug) that they use the tunnel to hide it! There&#39;s much more like that too and this film does make you realise the ridiculous side to wars of days gone. Look out for great performances from Stephen Fry, Nicholas Lyndhurst &amp; Geoffrey Palmer. I&#39;ve seen this film twice on TV in 8 years, once in England in 1993 &amp; once in Sydney about a month ago. It doesn&#39;t surprise me what few voters who have voted have scored it so highly. It&#39;ll never catch on though, or even be repeated on TV again, as Kevin Spacey or Robert De Niro aren&#39;t in it.

The DVD box promises that this will be &#39;zany and hilarious&#39;. It proves to be neither. There&#39;s a nice idea here (to spoof PoW films) and they assembled a good cast (and Stephen Fry) to try and deliver that. Unfortunately it doesn&#39;t work. It gets lost in the abyss, not knowing whether it&#39;s a straight drama, or a comedy, ending up being neither convincingly. Nicholas Lyndhurst is good in it, he always is in whatever he does, sadly pigeonholed here in the UK for being just &#39;Rodney&#39; from &#39;Only Fools and Horses&#39;. Stephen Fry just plays the same role he&#39;s always played (badly), but Lyndhurst deserved this to be better. Sadly it&#39;s not.

I expected a lot going into this movie starring such a fine number of top notch British actors, but when all was said and done I was very let down. Geoffrey Palmer truly captures the role of the common dot, who seems to be aware that Germany is going to lose the war and is lackadaisical about his job monitoring and supposedly brutalizing his British prisoners. The German guards are all old men that can be easily bribed by chocolate and sweets, and the British prisoners, while they know their prisoners, are treated comically well with little supervision. The first half of the movie is the funny part of the movie, where the British prisoners are openly developing an escape plan that the comment on German guards are aware of. Fearing the Germany would lose the war the commandant and the Germans work out a plan with their British prisoners to escape. It&#39;s almost slapstick good time for the first 35 minutes of the movie, but suddenly in the midst of the escape, the British prisoners break off their deal with the Germans, all of whom are now outside the camp, and the British Prisoners commandeer the camp to continue the easy life posing as German soldiers knowing the war will end soon. The movie muddles from there, the previously funny British RAF Commander find some shelf in a position or suddenly hi echelons of the German SS and Nazi government are coming to check in on him and threaten the welfare of the camp and the lives of the British prisoners because they are cared for too well and not brutalized. The British commander tries to convince his fellow prisoners that they have to put on a show while the yeses are around to make it appear as if they are being punished, brutalized, and are greatly demoralized so the SS will go away. For some reason the prisoners suddenly forget the severity of what the SS could do to them and mutiny against their commander, but for no clear reason. 60 minutes into the film it just doesn&#39;t make sense anymore and loses it&#39;s credibility as a satire or comic effort. After the SS have seen the level of demoralization that existed at the cap, the British RAF Commander who has been posing as the Nazi commandant it suddenly swept to Berlin where he is presented the Iron Cross by Hitler. Hitler is portrayed somewhat satirically, similar to the presentation of the black comedy movie Look Who&#39;s Back (a German movie, titled in German, Er ist Wieder da). When the British RAF Commander returns to the prison camp, the British army is in the process of overtaking the camp, where they are surprised to learn it has been in the British prisoner&#39;s hands. The commanders fellow prisoners claim him to be the authentic German commandant, and won&#39;t stand up for him actually being a British soldier, making it appear as if he is either being held again as a prisoner of war, or possibly killed by friendly fire. It&#39;s a pitiable ending that makes very little sense and is unsatisfying. Of note, while the British commander is in Berlin to receive the Iron Cross, he bumps into the former POW Camp commandant who had escaped earlier in the movie. We find out the commandant was unable to escape to a neutral country and has been living in poverty in the ruins of Berlin unable to find refuge in the military or government because his German papers were stolen, and if it was found out he had left the pow campus commandant he would most certainly have been executed as a traitor. The common dentist pitiable, truly, as she is sympathetic both to the plight of his former British prisoners as well as his own plight of living in fear if he&#39;s ever found out. By the end of movies just not funny, the last half an hour drags, and no matter how hard the actors try the quality of the scriptures declines and the movie falls into an abyss.

User reviews

Stalag Luft

Modestly funny but way too long

Stalag Luft 3

Hilarious

Stalag Luft

Unsatisfying rubbish confused about its purpose

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