STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
The War Pigs are a group of gung ho, loose cannon young fighting men during World War 2, who have a new arrival in their midst on the commanding front, in the shape of French captain Hans Picault (Dolph Lundgren), while behind closed doors, shady Captain Wosick (Luke Goss) has been given an assignment by Major AJ Redding (Mickey Rourke) to go behind enemy lines and take out a new super missile that Hitler plans to use. Along the way, conflicts of personality and aversion to authority are brought to the fore, before their final, hell for glory battle.
A WW2 adventure is an ambitious undertaking for one of Dolph Lundgren's direct to DVD action features, but the big Swede has gone for it and delivered this dreary, uninvolving effort, a major step back from the superior human trafficking thriller Skin Trade from last year. A period piece can work for such a film, as Jean Claude Van Damme's underrated film The Quest showed, but here Dolph is part of a hugely boring film, where he's required to deliver a terribly unconvincing French accent.
How Lundgren, along with other action film notables Luke Goss and Mickey Rourke, could team together and produce something so flat and low on action is anyone's guess. As it is, it just grinds through the clichés of male bonding during times of war, as well as the survival instinct and camaraderie, running in at a blissfully short running time which just about ensures you don't nod off before the end. It's too mature and slow, like the guys were trying to act their age and make something more considered, when they really should have just thought what the fans were expecting and run along those lines more. **
