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RAF Captain Robert Banks (Joseph Millson), the plucky hero, is instructed to parachute into occupied southeast France in order to infiltrate a Nazi bunker that might be containing French resistance leader Pierre Lavigne (Ronan Summers). The intelligence is probably reliable because it comes from Lavigne’s English wife Ivy (Rebecca Scott), an old school friend of Banks’s now heading up an insurgent cell in her husband’s absence. With the hope of old school friends uniting in battle and joining forces with real-life military intelligence, who would assign Banks more precise objectives like not annoying the enemy but indeed moving in and doing the thing.
War Blade is advancing in its multilingual approach, as Scott manages to switch between English and French while speaking to both factions and also has on his team a nurse from Germany who escaped from the bunker Saskia (Alina Tamara). Perhaps a narrower situational focus instead of the rampaging action-adventure style would have allowed writer-director Nicholas Winter to concentrate his modest budget. It not only reveals the financial constraints but also allows for lazy characterization that misses the mark with the Chekhov’s guns it picks up. Winter leads with Ivy as a ruthless guerrilla fighter, but she ends up being an incompetent burden. ‘Hothead’ explosives expert Charlie (Michael McKell) is an utterly pathetic romantic instead of the supposed hard-ass he is.
As expected, this aimless journey is propelled through illogical assumptions, such as this one: why not let go save the overzealous SS officers who have been at your mercy? The abstraction is justified and is one of the few FX shots done in model work that is quaintly executed. A tank nose diving into a chasm is one of the better animated features. Unfortunately, the ground has long since eroded from beneath this dud, and it is no longer sturdy enough to support the brothers in arms high drama or the pulp Reichsploitation.
But this will not please either the fans of action or war movies. As for filmmakers, War Blade lacks value other than serving in the niche where there are big ideas along with no funding available. The only use it serves for film schools is to be an example of a poorly executed feature film which had a screenplay that could be considered generic and no one capable of doing on-set blocking, staging, shooting, choreographing a death match, or editing was present.
All that is needed is a single, perfectly accurate command car from the era. From the looks of things, they got the aged owner to drive it, as well.
The third act throws in a cost-cutting twist plus a bloody twist or two, and the difference in execution and polish is startling.
But this will not please fans of action montages or war movies. War Blade is of importance to filmmakers with grand ideas but little funding or to film institutions where it can be screened as an example of what can be achieved with limited resources, a generic script, and no one on set that can block, stage, shoot, and edit a plausible duel.
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