mikethevike

The four stars are for the cast, the sets, the realistic equipment, uniforms, weapons and vehicles. What doesn't deserve any stars is the terribly bad story line, the piles of clichés and the totally unrealistic battle scenes. The final battle is so unrealistic it makes you want to laugh when you should be gripping your seat. The young gunner in the front seat with his single forward pointing machine gun having hundreds of German running back and forth like chickens in front of his sights for the entire battle is ludicrous... In the real world a crew in this situation (Trapped in an immobilized tank surrounded on all sides by 200 veteran SS soldiers with dozens of anti tank weapons!) would have been killed within 10 seconds. The dialogs are long-winded, absurd and destroy the momentum of the movie. The script seems copied on SPR without the realism and the intensity. This had the subject, budget, actors, sets and equipment to be a great war movie. How sad...

This remake has no reason to exist. It is shallow and poorly acted and lacks most of the tense emotions and moral questions raised by the original. Hollywood at its worst, cellophane-wrapped, uninspired, made-for-TV quality, cookie cutter remake. Of course, it is padded with clichés, cheap effects and mass-appeal frosting to bring out brain-dead teen movie goers. Why did a great actor like James Wood let himself get suckered into this disaster? This could have been an so-so B-action movie but trying to cash in on the status of Sam Peckinpah's cult classic is a really cheap move. It also forces me to give it a 1-star rating rather than a 4 to 5 rating it could have earned if it didn't ask to be compared with the former.

If you consider watching this movie, please rent the original instead. It is still as intense as it was in 1971 and actually raises a lot of disturbing questions. A true classic.