Das Himmelfahrtskommando

THE LAST DROP could have been a better WW II film had the writer and director decided on the focus. The directorial choices vary from very fine (mixing black and white grainy shots from war footage with stagy though competent settings in color) to questionable (allowing a musical score including steel guitar music and contemporary sounds to intrude into a time when such instrumentation was not even known) to mediocre (allowing the actors to be caricatures instead of players in a tense drama).

Essentially the story is set before Christmas with the dropping of troops via gliders into Holland to secure a secret mission involving looted Nazi treasure. The Germans are fast-driving to capture it and send it to Berlin before the Allies land. The British team is determined to maintain custody of the goods until war's end. And then of course there is a group of self-promoting Germans who simply want to capture the treasure for their own reward. Not a bad set of conflicts, but the film's problems are centered on some bad casting choices that prevent the momentum from being as relentlessly forward as good war films should. Some of the cast members look so much alike that it becomes difficult to determine just who is who: in one case this is intentional as the plot reveals in its ending, but in most cases it is a problem due to cramped dialects, stiff acting, and over the top parody. With the exception of Billy Zane and Michael Madsen there are no big names here and in many ways that is a good thing because the two stars are the weakest characters.

Though the plot outline has possibilities - what is war but greed under different names - the mixture of ribald humor and gut-wrenching realism fail to make the story work. Grady Harp

This could have been a good film if only people had taken it's production a bit more seriously. We see several clips of a Horsa Glider being towed over to Holland. On take off it is towed by a 4 engine Short Stirling, then its being towed by a twin engined DC3 Dakota (C47). As they cross the Dutch coast it is being towed by a Handley Page Halifax!

The CGI is poor compared with other recent films, and continuity is a joke. The glider in the air has RAF roundels which on the ground become French! The glider in the air has RAF roundels which on the ground become French! How can so much money be spent on films only to have such stupid mistakes? It doesn't stop there what with a very modern looking truck being used in one sequence and later a very poorly disguised Antonov AN-2 trying to look like a JU52 on floats. The countryside and settings look very little like Holland...its almost an insult to our intelligence and sad when you realise that it wouldn't have taken a great deal to get it right.

Lastly, is it meant as a gritty heist movie, a gritty war drama or a bit of a romp? I got the feeling that the makers of this film changed their mind on a daily basis. If they had only stuck to their original idea I might have found it more believable.

I saw the last drop yesterday, and within a few minutes knew that i would be disappointed. The acting, on the whole was sub-standard, as was the script. And don't get me started on the score...whoever thought putting 80's style guitar rock music in the background during one scene should really be looking for another job.

The action, to be fair, had it's moments. There's a nice shootout near the beginning, and whilst there's no real 'gore' as such, the level of violent realism is fairly gritty.

I suppose the crux of my dislike for this movie is based around that fact that it seems to present ww2 in a light-hearted way. There's too many attempts at one-liner humour which just don't come off, or might be better suited to a romantic comedy. World War Two was many things. Horrific, heroic, gruelling, disgusting, wasteful...but funny it most certainly was not.

4/10

Let me start by saying I picked this movie up for $3 at a used book store. And frankly, I do not regret it. There is an interesting quality about this movie that leaves me satisfied with the movie experience. It starts with expectations. When your marquee actors are Billy Zane and Michael Madsen, no matter how high budget the DVD case would like you to believe it is, you know going in that it is a B-Movie. Kind of like anything with C. Thomas Howell in it. So if you go in expecting a Saving Private Ryan, that is your oversight, not the makers of this film. Clearly in the aerial shots and crash scene at the beginning, one gets a good idea as to the "budget". There is nothing quality about this movie except maybe the true events surrounding the plot. I'm a fan of art and art history and WWII provides numerous interesting stories about art theft and art rescue. However, whereas the quality of the movie stinks, it's at least interesting. Low-B actors, recognizable character actors from bigger movies (see Tommy Flanagan in Braveheart), bad accents, poor dialogue, and to make matters worse the movie can't decide what it is going to be. Initially it starts out as a serious war movie and by the end of the movie, it had tried to become a Guy Ritchie film. Somewhere in the middle as the Germans steal a truck, hard rock music starts playing and the whole tone of the movie changes. Regardless of how bad this movie is, it is still an enjoyable time waster just to immerse yourself in bad movie-making.

I've just seen "The Last Drop". Honestly, I had to watch it twice to see the whole film, for it failed to pull me in like other wartime-movies usually do. Having seen so many excellent wartime-movies, my expectations were at the beginning fairly high. Unfortunately, I was left disappointed for "The Last Drop" is no match for great movies such as "The Great Raid" or "Saving Private Ryan". The film lacks tension and suspense, as it shifts from one scene to another, as well as professional acting to carry out a good quality performance. I agree with the rest of you who claim the accents being indescribable and improper for everyone seems to speak with his own variety of British accent. That's just weird. To my opinion, the whole production of the movie is bad as the storyline loses thread and a viewer is thus left confused and rather disturb. On the other hand, putting in real footage makes the film a little bit more plausible and somehow makes up for the weak script reflected in excruciatingly poor dialogue. There is some ribald sense of humor to spice things up, yet not enough to bring characters into life. All in all, the scriptwriter and the producer of the film provide a viewer with low budget special effects, bad scenery and a sort of a mish-mash of old (jazz) and modern (rock!! :S ) soundtrack music. So, if you really do want to watch a wartime-movie, try to avoid this one and pick the miniseries "Band Of brothers" or one of the above mentioned movies instead.