Force 10 from Navarone (1978)

***Comic book “men on a mission” WW2 adventure with a great cast and lots of action***

Major Mallory and Sgt. Miller (Robert Shaw and Edward Fox) from “The Guns of Navarone” (1961) are commissioned to Yugoslavia to find & eliminate the German spy who tried to sabotage their mission at Navarone (Franco Nero). To get there, they have to join with an American unit on a covert mission to blow up a bridge. Harrison Ford plays the leader of the operation while Carl Weathers plays a sergeant escaping the MPs, a last minute addition. Barbara Bach and Richard Kiel show up later.

"Force 10 from Navarone” (1978) is the McDonalds equivalent of the first movie. This doesn’t mean it’s necessarily bad (after all, McDonalds ain’t bad), just that it lacks the class of its predecessor and trades it in for cartoonish writing and loads of action. It’s sort of a mixture of the first film with "Where Eagles Dare" (1968) and “Hornets’ Nest” (1970), but with a wildly comic book tone à la “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981), albeit less goofy and not as proficient. The cast is great, though, and the locations are to die for. It’s just that the writing is glaringly juvenile.

FYI: This was Robert Shaw's second to last movie; he died of a heart attack three months before release at the too-young age of 51.

The film runs 1 hour, 58 minutes, and was mostly shot in the former Yugoslavia (e.g. Durdevica Tara Bridge on Tara River, Montenegro; and Jablanica Dam, Jablanicko Lake, Bosnia and Herzegovina).

GRADE: B-

You could always count on Ron Goodwin to come up with a lively score for a wartime movie, and he does so well here with this “Guns of Navarone” spin-off. It keeps the “Mallory” (Robert Shaw) and “Miller” (Edward Fox) roles and introduces them to American colonel “Barnsby” (Harrison Ford) as they hijack a Lancaster bomber and end up in Yugoslavia where the partisan army is fighting the encroaching Nazi war machine. The former two are up for tracking down a fifth columnist called “Nikolai” who had caused them considerable grief in Greece earlier in the war. The Colonel is to try and help the locals - led by “Petrovich” (Alan Badel) to stop the advancing army, and that means holding a vital bridge. Of course, when they arrive they have to find their potential allies, and with nobody quite sure who to trust, and the menacing “Drazak” (Richard Kiel without shiny teeth) on their trail, it’s dangerous stuff. A combination of fairly easy clues let us know who the baddie is, but as the adventure heads to it’s quite exciting denouement, there are loads of escapades for our ever diminishing squad as they set about their tasks. Ford and Shaw work well together, Fox and Franco Nero also do just about enough and the whole thing rollicks along nicely for just shy of a two hours that also introduces us to some earthily disguised WWII explosive devices. It was probably made just a decade too late to really resonate as a film about the atrocities of war, but as an action adventure film from a lesser-known theatre of the war, it’s quite an enjoyable watch that passes the time without stretching your grey cells too much.