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).
In the opening scenes, Holden and his friends are ambushed over northern France by planes that look like British aircraft but which turn out to be flown by Germans. The Nazis have had this whole Trojan Spitfire thing going on where they scavenge downed planes, repair them and then fly them to catch Allied missions unawares, which apparently was a real thing. After the attack, Holden’s surviving comrades are captured by the Nazis and kept captive at a base where they learn that the enemy is just about to deploy some kind of superbomb, capable of destroying a whole city (no one calls it a nuclear weapon).
Eventually, Holden gets to the base and helps free his friends, as well as a few previously captured Allied soldiers and Kara Joy Reed doing a very ’Allo ’Allo!-style French accent as a resistance fighter. They all battle their captors who, according to the hallowed rules of trash-movie logic, are mostly much worse shots than the good guys. It’s all so retro, it’s sort of cute.
• Operation: Wolf Hound is available on 4 July on digital platforms.
