True story. When I watched The Fatal Mission, the fourth and final entry into the thoroughly unnecessary trio of TV movie sequels to follow The Dirty Dozen, I mistakenly thought I was watching the previous entry, The Deadly Mission, instead. However, while accidently watching the movies out of sequence is certainly annoying, it’s hardly disastrous as the franchise flew off the tracks a long time ago (1985, to be exact), this actually managed to perfectly highlight the main issue with the follow ups. While I was watching it, I didn’t actually figure out that it was completely the wrong film until an impressive 45 minutes had already passed (don’t ask me how I managed to finally cotton on) and if your movies are so painfully similar that viewers have no idea which they’re currently watching, surely you’ve got a problem. Anyway, is the final hurrah of the Dirty Dozen as fatal as the title makes out, or this explosive entry yet another damp squib?
We are reunited with Major Wright (definitely not Archer Maggott) mid-mission as he and his commandos are too late to save an informant from getting gunned down by those dastardly Nazis in Denmark. However just before he coughs up his last trickle of blood, the poor guy manages to pass on the confusing clue of “vierundzwanzig, zwanzig”. After a spot of brainstorming with General Sam Worden back in London, it’s eventually deduced that there’s a German plot in place to establish a Fourth Reich that will see a cluster of loyal and influential Nazis transported to Istanbul by train via the old Orient Express route and put to work by SS General Kurt Richter. And the train carriage these guy will housed in? You’ve guessed it – 2420, or to German speakers vierundzwanzig, zwanzig.
To nip this new Reich in the bud, Worden decides to donate all of his sizable brain power and experience to come up with a radical and utterly original plan that is so ingenious even the most intelligent Nazi will find it impossible to predict and defend against. Nah, only kidding – he just gets Wright to quickly whip up yet another Dirty Dozen and train them in double quick time for the chance to avoid the noose or serious jail time. Among the group this time is ex-Mafia hitman D’Agostino, murderer Hamilton and the charismatic Hamilton. However, this time proves to be a little different as during a parachute training exercise, one of the Dozen’s chutes doesn’t open leading Wright to suspect a traitor in their midst. Knocking that all important number back up to twelve by recruiting the female Lieutenant Carol Cambell for her linguistic skills, Wright insists the mission still go ahead and before you know it, the newest incarnation of the Dirty Dozen have boots on the ground in Yugoslavia – but even as Wright changes the plans on the fly in an attempt to bamboozle the turncoat in their midst, can this latest gaggle of murderous and misanthropic misfits manage to put the kibosh on a whole new Reich?
So yet another entry in the Dirty Dozen cannon means yet another sequel that follows the franchise manifesto to the letter while barely changing a single thing. As per design, we have the recruitment phase which fails to adequately flesh out a single one of our new recruits other than the standard, tragic sob story that feels like it should be being told to the panel on America’s Got Talent, we have the requisite banter between Ernest Borgnine and Telly Savalas as both see their military uniforms strain against visibly middle-aged physiques, we then skim through the training faster than a Rocky montage before settling on a scrappy, made-up-as-they-go-along Mission that predictably ends in massive explosions. You have to wonder that by the time this final and noticably tired entry actually aired on American television back in 1988, did anyone actually care?
The only real benefits here are if you can’t get enough of standard men on a mission tropes, then The Fatal Mission (which isn’t even that fatal) has you covered with yet another 90 minutes that go almost exactly as you’d expect them to. If you care about any of the characters here, chances are it’s only because you actually recognise them; for example, I was more invested in the characters played by one of the Ghostbusters (Ernie Hudson) and that dude from the motorcycle cop show (Eric Estrada) than I was in any of the others – but then, if I’m being truly being honest, I didn’t care for them more all that much… With that being said, this is obviously a labour of love for absolutely nobody and everyone here is in solid, do-it-for-the-money mode.
Savalas, usually a dynamo of charisma, seems visibly agitated that he’s agreed to do another film and delivers his desperate, life or death orders in the manner of a coffee shop manager who is pissed he’s agreed to do last minute overtime. Borgnine us even worse and has checked out to such an extent that his spectacular mispronunciation of the word “Valkyrie” caused my OCD to completely shit the bed. As for the rest of the Dozen? Literally no one stands out because presumably they don’t want to, but your imagination can’t help but try and fill in the blanks to make things more interesting – like when Erik Estranda traitorous hitman eventually buys the farm, my brain commented that it’s a shame that no one remarks that he’s had his CHiPs, or other silly shit like that.
Apart from other issues like a modern day black cab sitting in the background of 1940s London and some corner cutting during large set pieces, the mission itself stubbornly refuses to be even remotely gripping, squeezing minimal tension out of the traitor subplot, or the recruitment of women into the adventure presumably so that that can have enough money in the kitty to blow everything up in the final scene. A blow it up they do and the Dozen turn the train they’ve hijacked into a veritable bomb on tracks that hurtles into the enemy and detonates, somehow killing every single German in the surrounding area but leaving the surviving heroes completely unhinged. Even Germans who are nowhere near the climactic explosion suddenly collapse and die like they’re part of a Nazi hive mind like the alien army at the end of The Avengers, or something and watching the enemy suddenly fall over and simply stop living is both weirdly insulting and fairly hilarious. In fact, the entire sorry episode was almost salvaged by the sight of the main villain standing directly in the path of a flaming juggernaut with the plan to stop a runaway train with a mere pistol and if Hitler really was banking on guys without the common sense to avoid a flaming locomotive to run an extra Reich for him, maybe it wasn’t the towering threat Ernest Borgnine seemed to think it was…
The final adventure of the Dirty Dozen plays more like the trashy twelve, as The Fatal Mission fizzles the whole enterprise out with a by the numbers adventure defiantly refuses to change the rules. It also doesn’t help that once again, a TV budget fails to help this famously scrappy scrub up even remotely well.
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