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In this film, the murder of a Polish prostitute is under investigation by a Nazi police officer played by Omar Sharif, though even his excellent acting skills could not make him look Aryan. Nor does the film satisfactorily explain why so much effort is expended to find the killer by a regime which was busy murdering millions of prostitutes and others the Nazis deemed "undesirables" - especially when the suspect was no less than a Nazi General.

The mystery is which of three Nazi Generals murdered the prostitute, but you would have to be either blind or stupid not to know as soon as all three are seen on the screen together.

The film was produced by Sam Spiegel, who cannibalized the stars from his earlier successes: Sharif and Peter O'Toole from Lawrence of Arabia, Sharif (again) and Tom Courtenay from Doctor Zhivago, and even Donald Pleasence and Nigel Stock from The Great Escape, which was not a Speigel project.

Speigel also enlisted composer Maurice Jarre from his earlier films to compose a pitifully lackluster musical score to elevate this mediocre drama to no more than five stars out of ten.

I have been a fan of the show from the very beginning. Unlike a number of critics, I enjoyed the backstories of the athletes, many of them overcoming almost unimaginable personal challenges and adversities that were both heartwarming and inspiring.

I also enjoyed the competition itself, where these remarkable athletes raced through obstacles in four stages of increasing difficulty. It was them against the obstacles, culminating in the opportunity for the few surviving finalists to climb the massive Mount Midoriyama to win the grand prize of a million dollars.

But that all has changed this season. Now the athletes are racing against each other along the same course confronting the same obstacles over the entire season. That's right: each and every week we are watching the same people on the same obstacle course over and over and over again and again and again. A once exciting show has now become repetitive and boring. Mount Midoriyama is a distant memory.

Even the location of the show has become repetitive and boring. In an obvious bid to cut production costs, the regional competitions that were once held across the country have been eliminated. The entire season is now shot on the same course in the same city of Las Vegas.

And that's not the only cut in production costs. Now the grand prize of a million dollars is only a quarter of what it once was. Hardly 'grand' any more and barely worth the full year of sacrifice, dedication and hardship it takes these athletes to train for their fleeting moments of fame.

I urge you to read Roger Ebert's review of this pathetic excuse for a film. You can access his review through IMDb. My only criticism of Ebert is that by giving the film two stars he gave it one star too many.

It's both telling and deserving that the film was a massive financial flop, proving that it was soundly rejected by the paying public once word-of-mouth reached a potential audience too savvy to waste their time and money on such claptrap.

Leland, the movie's titular character, is a sociopathic teenager who stabs to death the autistic brother of his girlfriend after she dumps him, but the film thinks it's clever by obscuring this obvious reason why Leland killed her brother, as he sits in the prison library speaking in riddles and platitudes that are supposed to sound profound.

When Leland himself is murdered in prison in a ridiculous plot contrivance, I breathed a sigh of relief that someone had the wisdom, courage and fortitude to finally shut him up.