There’s nothing more gripping than a good old Second World War set, men on a mission movie from the classic years that saw a scattering of familiar actors take on the Jerries behind enemy lines as they seek to win the war via some clandestine suicide mission. The sixties seemed to be something of a golden age for this type of flick with the sizable high point of the genre being J. Lee Thompson’s adaption of Alistair MacLean’s The Guns Of Navarone that saw Gregory Peck and David Niven stick it to the Hun with massive success and the powers that be were clamouring for a sequel. However, it soon became obvious that creating a follow up would be just as difficult and complex as mounting a mission to blow up an enemy encampment or assassinate a general and it took well over fifteen years for Force 10 From Navarone to surface.
The critical response was hardly kind, but is this belated sequel really as bad as critics claimed? In other words was the dam our heroes ultimately target not the only thing that blows?
After their desperate, yet ultimately successful, mission to take out the guns of Navarone, Major Keith Mallory and explosives expert Sergeant Donovan “Dusty” Miller are given yet another seemingly impossible job to pull off despite Mallory barely being healed from a broken leg obtained on that fateful task. Their orders are simple: locate and eliminate Nicolai, the German spy who nearly brought down their Navarone campaign by squealing to the Nazis and who now has disguised himself as a Captain Lescovar who has infiltrated the anti-Nazi guerrilla forces of Yugoslavia.
To get to their target, Mallory and Miller are piggy backing on the shoulders of Force 10, an American commando unit led by the gruff Colonel Mike Barnsby tasked with blowing up a vital bridge and on the way, they somehow pick up Weaver, a former military prisoner who gets caught up in the chaos, but soon after swiping a plane to start their mission, matters go immediately tits up after they’re shot down and have to continue on in Yugoslavia with only a fraction of their team left alive (Force 5?).
From there, the survivors realise that both their missions are utterly fucked unless they join forces and find themselves some desperately needed equipment and allies to pull this out the bag, but first they have to avoid falling foul of Chetniks working in collaboration with the Nazis and try to survive long enough to reach the Partisan forces who will hopefully aid them. Of course, everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. When they’re not falling foul of the Chetniks and having to come up with numerous audacious lies to stay alive, they discover that Captain Lescovar has managed to worm his way into the very group Force 10 needs to rely on and the explosives they have simply won’t be enough to cripple that bridge. Can our heroes manage to pull a win out of the bag for good old Blighty?
The feelings for Force 10 at the time of its release wasn’t exactly glowing and the reason mostly seems to be that no one wanted a traditional, old school, war movie with traditional values as it was considered horribly old fashioned in 1978. I have to admit, these days, every war film made before the 1980s tends to feel massively similar so initially it’s rather tough to understand why 70s audiences would be so vitriolic against a war film that harkened back to more classic films. However, the 70s was a decade notable for throwing off the established order of cinema and forging new forms of filmmaking, so such a shameless throwback wasn’t exactly welcomed with open arms.
However, decades later, while Force 10 From Navarone hardly stands alongside the cream of the men on a mission crop such as Where Eagles Dare, The Dirty Dozen and – yes – The Guns Of Navarone, it does have some old school virtues to cherish with the main one being a cast that plays like a who’s who of action and adventure movies. I don’t know if you’ve ever played that game where you look at a particularly stacked cast on a movie poster and immediately started pointing out which franchises or iconic characters they’re associated with, but Force 10 From Navarone has a fucking doozy. Where else should you find Han Solo teaming up with Quint from Jaws to fight Nazis with the Jackal and Apollo Creed only to find that both Agent Triple X and Jaws from The Spy Who Loved Me has been thrown in as a bonus – I mean as randomly varied casts go, it’s something of a fucking goldmine. It’s a bit of a shame, then, that some of the group visibly don’t agree. While both Robert Shaw and Harrison Ford have both mentioned in interviews how much they disliked the experience, it seems to be clearly written all over the latter’s face and it feels less like it’s an “Harrison Ford acting” thing and more like a ” disgruntled doing it for the money” thing.
At least Shaw manages to disguise it somewhat by engaging in a contest with Edward Fox about who can play the most unreasonably polite English man in the film, but even they can’t seem to manage to equal the double act of Peck and Niven from the original movie and rarely even feel like they’re even playing the same characters. Elsewhere, Carl Weathers is dumped with the angry black guy role that was fairly standard back in the 60s but feels a little awkward a decade later, but it is fairly novel to see the gargantuan form of Richard Kiel playing a hulking Chetnik and Barbara Bach as a double agent. Although I have to say that it’s immensely ironic that director Guy Hamilton made so many prominent Bond films and yet cast two people from The Spy Who Loved Me from a 007 entry he had nothing to do with.
While Force 10 From Navarone tends to go easy on us in regards to its running time (under two hours is something of a rarity for this kind of thing) unfortunately it’s pulpy nature and Hamilton’s somewhat bland direction doesn’t really invoke the days of Goldfinger and Live And Let Die and as a result, the adventure is directionless fun rather than being as vitally taut as men on a mission movies need to be. Still, the sight of Shaw and Ford together may not challenge the novelty of the double act of Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood in Where Eagles Dare, but it’s still suitably surreal enough to keep you watching as Force 10 goes through the motions.
Nowhere near as bad as some reviews – or Ford’s impatient demeanour – would have you believe, it’s still a lesser entry in a genre that’s usually does its best work on a lazy bank holiday afternoon. However, with such an eccentric cast it still manages to have its plus points – if you choose to force it.
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