Let’s be clear: this second world war action movie is cliched, wooden and excessively long. Nevertheless, you’ve got to give its director, producer, co-writer and supporting player Michael B Chait and his team a little credit for pulling together what must have been a reasonably expensive shoot for an independent film. You’ve got your aerial dogfights, your period production design (albeit often camouflaged in darkness) and lashings of blanks, squibs and controlled explosive material to make for a very noisy, if tediously protracted, series of climaxes. There are many more egregious wastes of money out there in the world.
At least this one, for all its flaws and completely unironic macho posturing, will please some viewers with its many shots of muscled, sweaty soldiers in vests. In one particular, and especially homoerotic, sequence, star James Maslow, playing wounded Jewish air force pilot David Holden, applies dressings to his wounds, a process that requires a lot of writhing about on his back, belt unbuckling, and hollering, supposedly in pain (although it’s hard to tell).
