You just don’t get that many war time sequels, do you?
I mean, there’s certainly enough characters who have served in the military who tend to come back for a follow-up or six, but movies actually set during wartime tend not to get laden down with further installments. Well, fittingly considering their distain for the rules, The Dirty Dozen chose to do the opposite when they returned for not one, not two, but three made for television adventures during the 80s for reasons that have never been particularly clear to me.
In fact, not much about The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission makes a whole lot of sense. The fact the first sequel surfaced around sixteen years after the original is fairly confusing for a start and 80s television was hardly an auspicious home for the continuing adventures of one of the most famous, WWII, men-on-a-mission movies that’s ever existed. However, if you think the existence of The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission is baffling enough, you should try watching it…
In 1944, Major General Worden gets wind of a plot via the French Resistance that certain members of of the German army, namely Waffen-SS General Dietrich, is plotting a second attempt on Hitler’s life. Now, you’d think that this would be peachy news, but word of the Führer’s impending doom has gotten the Allied’s war boffins a little rattled because Hitler’s leadership is on the wane so much, if he was actually replaced it could conceivably prolong the war indefinitely. That’s right, as bizarre and counter intuitive as it sounds, the call goes out that Hitler must be saved at all costs. To do this would mean a squad of men would have to go behind enemy lines to assassinate Dietrich before he can put his plan in action, but seeing as any such mission would inevitably end in death, there’s only one man Worden thinks to call.
Allow me to reintroduce Major John Reisman whose previous suicide mission as the leader of the Dirty Dozen hasn’t exactly curbed his hatred of authority as he’s awaiting trial for hijacking a steak and booze shipment meant for an officer’s do. Before you know it, he’s once again tasked to put together another platoon of psychos, miscreants and deserters in order to do the jobs that normal soldiers who do what they’re told would never be strong-armed to do and as John trains them, he gets the same attitude he got from the previous recruits.
However, if the last plan tackled by the Dirty Dozen was nigh impossible to put off, this one is a fucking doozy as it requires the entire squad to land in a Nazi controlled French airfield and pass as Germans due to their uniforms – however, somehow no one in the unit has realised that one of their number, the defiant Dregors, is black, which creates an understandably massive problem when they realise it upon landing. Believe it or not, this ultimately proves to be the least of their troubles…
To be honest, aside from the whole TV angle, there’s not much difference between this incredibly tired and confoundingly late sequel and the string of follow-ups that arrived in the wake of The Magnificent 7 that also featured photocopy plotting and more than it’s fair share of grizzled, over the hill cast members looking to earn an undemanding buck. Essentially, its just the exact same story, with a disgraced Lee Marvin, now pinker of face and bushier of eyebrow, having to whip a new team of anti-social upstarts into shape in order to perform some utterly unsurvivable mission. The ubiquitous Ernest Borgnine returns as Major General Worden and once again spends his time being suspiciously cheerful about ordering Marvin to his certain doom despite our man looking all about sixty, but because this movie was made for the confines of television, this time the adventure is noticably shorter thanks to all those commercial breaks the station had to squeeze in.
As a result, Next Mission ends up having quite a few plot related issues that will probably strike viewers as either rather funny or incredibly infuriating depending on what your personal views on gaping holes in logic are. For a start, the gang are heading into France to save Hitler, which is wild enough when you think about it, but when the leader of the third reich actually puts in a performance later in the film (played by the same dude who portrayed him in the third Indiana Jones flick – combined universe perhaps?), a character has a moral conundrum about whether to shoot him or the man plotting his demise. Surely the correct answer is shoot both, but the movie hasn’t the balls to take matters that far.
It does have the balls, however, to create possibly the most unintentionally hilarious problem that any war movie has ever presented when it’s finally realised that having a black guy dressed as a Nazi isn’t exactly going to pass muster once they touch down in France. Now while you could argue that this is a pointed jab at systemic racism, do you mean to tell me that no one, not even the man himself, figured out this was going to be a problem until five minutes before their plane is about to touch down on a German airfield? The fact that they hide him under some bandages like the Invisible Man certainly doesn’t help…
Elsewhere, the men are told that they can’t parachute in because they have no training only to do exactly that when they fall behind their schedule and spend the first third training to hijack a moving train only to not do that at all when they finally attack it while it’s stopped and you feel that the TV budget probably whittled down any chance of having any complicated setpieces once the checks for Marvin and Borgnine had been cashed.
Another predictable casualty of such a threadbare production is that we get to spend almost no time getting to know this new Dozen other than a scattered instances of surface level personality traits such as silent, dumb, racist or angry (sounds like the dwarves who didn’t make the cut of Snow White) and in some cases, I’m not even sure which ones survived and which didn’t. Still, I feel we were cheated out of something particularly cool thanks to the fact that the film has Predator’s Sonny Landham in the cast and chooses noy to cut him loose on hordes of advancing Nazis, which potentially could have made up for the fact that the exteriors look like they were shot in a field in Dorset.
Muddled, compromised and at times almost feeling like out and out parody, The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission may be a black eye on the face of the original, but I have to admit, the film powers by thanks to unintentional chuckles alone. Sure, Lee Marvin looks like he checked out after the first script reading and the movie simply can’t regain its composure after it reveals that we’re going to save Hitler, but there’s something endlessly amusing about a TV movie trying to mount such a potentially epic mission without any chance of pulling it off. In other words, I guess you could say it’s cheaper by the dozen.
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