Play Dirty surprises because of how 'dirty' it actually gets, and how it doesn't give any easy beats for its characters. It follows the seemingly usual tropes of the men-on-a-mission war flick, where a group of men are selected practically on the basis that they won't succeed in their mission, and that the end goal is to blow something up. But unlike The Guns of Navarone or the Dirty Dozen, Play Dirty puts the position of the British army in this desert scene as greedy and malicious and really only caring about getting to the oil, and surely before the 'decoy' team gets there. It's entertaining but it's not what exactly one would call 'fun' like Navarone. It's a story of unheroic men doing some heroic things and always for the almighty dollar.
In the film, Michael Caine is a Captain Douglas in the army- he doesn't look entirely like the army type and no wonder since he was formerly a Petro-exec- who is put in charge of a group to go through rocky terrain in the North African desert to bomb an oil field. Only big snag is that this isn't the first time the mission has been attempted, and Captains have died already. With this in mind, the head guy puts Cyril Leech (Nigel Davenport) in charge to make sure the Captain is kept alive - at a good cost of two thousand pounds. This doesn't mean that Cyril won't get sometimes in the way of the Captains orders, like when they need to pull up their trucks over a rocky mountain ridge and he refuses to unload the trucks. It's an uneasy partnership with their fellow soldiers also not always sure who to follow, especially when coming into some enemy territory, or when they come upon a 'fake' enemy outpost in a sandstorm.
Andre De Toth's film is rough and tough, as any men-on-a-mission war film should be, but it has something extra to keep one interested. This is the guts to keep things rightfully violent and shocking (when a mine goes off at one point as another mine is being diffused, it's one of those moments you'll jump in your seat even at home), and at most mildly amusing. The characters aren't very colorful or even terribly memorable, although Caine and Davenport are both fantastic in their parts, often fantastic at being understated (as Davenport's Captain says, "look, listen, don't move, that's the way you survive"). The action is also intense enough but moves at that pace where suspense is genuinely built like in the climax among the oil barrels and the barbed wire. Even a scene involving an attempted rape is shown without any punches pulled, until the one oddly-effective laugh had at the outcome of the scene.
It's a forgotten little wonder of the world war two movie, and it's more bitter than sweet with its view of the buck-stops-here mentality of wartime - or rather, as a character points out, how war is "a criminal enterprise", hence having a guy like Cyril, who was in prison for fifteen years until being put to use on the mission. Play Dirty doesn't get really going until twenty minutes in, but once it does it doesn't play safe. 8.5/10
