Kelly's Heroes (1970)
Directed by Brian G. Hutton
A misfit group of World War II American soldiers goes AWOL to rob a bank behind German lines.
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What critics compared Kelly's Heroes to
Gunn takes inspiration for the film’s style from The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes , Where Eagles Dare , and Platoon .
Director James Gunn also cites early influences like the war films “The Dirty Dozen” and “Kelly’s Heroes” as the impetus not just for the story, but the style of film he sought to make which is gritty and real.
Influenced by movies like “The Dirty Dozen” and “Kelly’s Heroes,” Gunn achieves his goal of presenting a gritty, exciting, and damned funny cinematic experience.
But, while QT fans are still waiting for a film that doesn’t rely so heavily on past movie references (the score lifts from Kelly’s Heroes, The Entity (!) and Cat People (!!)), this is assembled with too much class to be anything other than a success.
But this time around he mixes anti-establishment war films like “The Dirty Dozen” and “Kelly’s Heroes” with Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns to deliver a spaghetti war drama that rewrites history.
The map leads to tens of millions in dollars in gold that Saddam Hussein stole from Kuwait, and the four guys who go after it are high on "Kelly's Heroes" bravado.
October 3, 1999 -- On the surface, "Three Kings" looks like a remake of "Kelly's Heroes" because the plot is about the same, but it is a curious mixture of cynicism and humanity.
On the surface "Three Kings" may look like a gulf war version of "Kelly's Heroes," but it's got a lot more in common with the movies "Catch-22" and "M*A*S*H."
But throughout the second half of the film, which started out as a Gulf War Kelly's Heroes, it devolves into a strange, semi-Shavian discussion and debate over our common humanity.
Recurring regularly from the 1960s to today, comic ensembles became popular with help from mad combat films like The Dirty Dozen (1967), Kelly’s Heroes (1970), the goofy medical support featured in M.A.S.H. (1970) and later, “slob comedies” like Animal House (1978).
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Peninsula still holds a number of pleasures; the thrust of the plotting involves desperate mercenaries performing a heist inside a warzone (in the early scenes it briefly appeared like this was going to be a Kelly’s Heroes take on the zombie movie, which is all I’ll be thinking about for a few weeks now), as well as a zombie sport/gladiator coliseum that looks like it could belong in a Mad Max or Conan the Barbarian movie.
Admittedly, there is one point when The Outpost threatens to dip into Kelly’s Heroes-like cliché: It’s the moment when Eastwood’s sergeant, seeing all is nearly lost, grits his teeth, Dirty Harry-like, and seethes “Not today!” — at which point he becomes a one-man fighting machine, rallying his comrades to follow him to inevitable bloody victory.
Companion viewing: “The Dirty Dozen,” “Kelly’s Heroes,” “Inglorious Basterds,” "Live Free and Die Hard"…