Attack Force Z; A movie saved from obscurity solely because it provided early rolls to Mel Gibson and Sam Neill. Throw parallels to The Guns of Navarone (1961), The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Where Eagles Dare (1968) and you got yourself an Australian knock-off of early tough-soldier- man American bravado.
A group of Australian special forces is deployed during WWII to recover the passengers of a downed plane in Japanese occupied Dutch East Indies. There they kick the proverbial hornets nest and try to stay alive thanks to the help of an underground resistance movement.
It was hard to get into this one largely due to its constant clichés. I guess I have seen the dramatic self-sacrifice of a noble comrade and stealth gone awry because a twig snapped way too many times. The characters themselves aren't incredibly developed and any attempt to flesh them out feels jerky and unnatural. At one point it just gets absurd as one character stays behind to protect the love interest he had shared a room with only a few cuts ago. Granted she prevented him from being discovered but besides a common enemy they had little to really bond over.
Another major problem I had was the elongated scenes involving other languages like Japanese and Cantonese. Perhaps it was just the version I saw but with no subtitles provided, I was forced to guess what they were saying and only later confirm what was going on. Plus if I'm not mistaken, they speak Malay in Indonesia not Cantonese.
A group of Australian special forces is deployed during WWII to recover the passengers of a downed plane in Japanese occupied Dutch East Indies. There they kick the proverbial hornets nest and try to stay alive thanks to the help of an underground resistance movement.
It was hard to get into this one largely due to its constant clichés. I guess I have seen the dramatic self-sacrifice of a noble comrade and stealth gone awry because a twig snapped way too many times. The characters themselves aren't incredibly developed and any attempt to flesh them out feels jerky and unnatural. At one point it just gets absurd as one character stays behind to protect the love interest he had shared a room with only a few cuts ago. Granted she prevented him from being discovered but besides a common enemy they had little to really bond over.
Another major problem I had was the elongated scenes involving other languages like Japanese and Cantonese. Perhaps it was just the version I saw but with no subtitles provided, I was forced to guess what they were saying and only later confirm what was going on. Plus if I'm not mistaken, they speak Malay in Indonesia not Cantonese.