War Blade – Review
Banks, an agent of the British SOE (Joseph Millson), is tasked with rescuing a French resistance leader, Pierre (Ronan Summers), from a Nazi bunker where he is “possibly” being held; although his orders do seem to be “Get in there and cause some bally mischief would you old chap ?!”
With the help of Saskia (Alina Tamara) a German Nurse who has escaped the clutches of the pesky Nazis, and a ragtag group of randoms, Banks must journey over enemy lines.
With his commanders already suspecting the bunker to hold much more than prisoners and aforementioned randoms to deal with, Banks faces dangers from all fronts.
Outnumbered and outgunned, will Banks and his merry band of misfits survive the deadly mission?
I don’t quite know what it is about Britain, but we don’t half love mentioning or making stuff about WWII. This low budget, boys own adventure/Battle comic type offering doesn’t really add anything new to the genre and I honestly expected it to be absolutely dreadful. I’m happy to report, it’s not that bad, it’s unlikely to be knocking at the door of the Academy, but still…
It has all of the cliches of a war film and most of the things I like to nitpick about low budget war films too.
We have the small cast in a huge battle feel, the randomly empty looking stately home rooms, the decrepit WWII buildings that surely would have been fairly new WWII buildings during WWII as well as the plot stalwarts like the lucky I had that in my pocket moment and the “leave me!, I’ll cover you” type stuff.
Some of the scenes are hampered only by their budget. There’s one with a tank that I’m assuming was done with some old school Thunderbirds type miniature work, but it was that good I’m not even sure!
Nicholas Winter does pretty well with the small budget with some beautiful cinematography and a real old school adventure score. Yes, the supporting characters are bizarre, yes most of it makes no sense, and yes I couldn’t tell if the explosive expert was supposed to be deaf or not (I may have missed the bit that got explained in) but it didn’t stop me enjoying the film for what it was, a fairly pleasant way to spend an hour and a half.
Here’s where I have to be completely honest with you, I’d have absolutely slated this film if it didn’t have THE finest Wilhelm scream in it.
I tell you, a decent Wilhelm always takes a low budget film from a 3 to a 7 but this one, man it takes it all the way to 11 I tell you!.
You can check out War Blade, and that fabulous Wilhelm when it is released on 15th January on digital from 101 films.
