The Last Drop

It's September 1944. A fortune in gold and art treasures is stashed under a Dutch farmhouse. The SS wants to get their hands on the loot so they can take it to Berlin and turn it over to Hitler. A group of renegade Nazi officers want to steal it for themselves. And a squad of commandos in a glider diverted from Operation Market Garden by British Intelligence crash-lands in Holland to go after the treasure, too.

I'd never heard of this movie until I saw the DVD of it in Blockbuster today, but the plot sounded to me like something out of an Alistair MacLean novel, and I was a huge fan of MacLean's books during the Sixties and Seventies. So I had to give it a try.

Unfortunately, this is a movie that's better in its concept than in its execution. The plot is confusing and hard to follow for two main reasons: several of the characters look so much alike it's hard to tell them apart, and the British and German accents are so thick that much of the dialogue was indecipherable to this ol' country boy's ears. The only recognizable actors are Billy Zane, who plays the Canadian pilot of the glider who is forced to accompany the commandos, and Michael Madsen, whose role as a flamboyant American colonel doesn't amount to much more than a cameo.

Despite its flaws, this movie isn't a total waste of time. The action scenes are pretty well-done, and the blending of actual World War II footage into the film works pretty well most of the time. It's a semi-entertaining way to pass a couple of hours, but it's no THE GUNS OF NAVARONE or WHERE EAGLES DARE.

Dang, now I want to go back and reread some Alistair MacLean, and I just don't have time right now.