5 Disperati duri a morire

Having appeared in films such as 'The Great Escape', 'Guns at Batasi', 'Flight of the Phoenix' and 'Dr. Dolittle', as well as making his directorial debut in 'Oh! What a Lovely War', Dickie Attenborough continued to act in films like this one in between directing his own. This was made just before he directed 'Young Winston'.

I saw this movie when it first came out, and it made a BIG impression on me -- because it was so BAD. I remember the ride home listening to my parents in the front seat absolutely trash this thing. There were holes in the plot big enough for a herd of elephants to trample through. My father (normally one of the sweetest men you'll ever meet) worked himself up to the point where he was criticizing the costumes.

As I remember (and it has been 35 years), a platoon is shown heading off into the jungle on a secret mission, and they are all in camouflage, "Except for that idiot," my father exclaims through bursts of laughter, "you know, the guy wearing RED on a secret mission!" And even though I was kind of young, I do remember how wooden the acting was, especially Alex Cord, who had to be one of the worst actors ever.

Bottom line: Good for a few laughs, but there is a reason this one is obscure.

While THE LAST GRENADE is perhaps the longest 90-minutes you'll ever spend on an action film, it actually needed to be twenty-minutes longer, right up front, since once-good-mercenary-turned-double-crossing Alex Cord is so deadly right off the bat, there's nothing to base things on when former partner Stanley Baker feels so betrayed...

Directed by Gordon Flemyng, the beautiful jungles of Hong Kong China are shown in revealing wide shots, not only to establish the location (when not in the busy city) but to show it off...

Meanwhile Baker and his men, including muscular Andrew Keir, token black Rafer Johnson along with Julian Glover and John Thaw, randomly traipse the jungle where Cord -- like Kurtz from HEART OF DARKNESS made famous later in APOCALYPSE NOW -- has become an eccentric kingpin surrounded by trained Asian foot soldiers...

So while there are some decent action sequences with Baker not only against Cord but the jungle itself, his third-act romance with British general's wife Honor Blackman (married to Richard Attenborough) kills the pace...

Leaving only a miscast Cord... speaking in a bad southern drawl and adorned in ironically mundane attire.. to be killed simply because, well, he's the villain. And Baker isn't.

Stanley Baker and Alex Cord used to be buddies until the Congo. Now Baker, in London to deal with his tuberculosis, is hired by Whitehall. Cord is making trouble on the border between China and Hong Kong. The local commanding general, Richard Attenborough, can't do anything, since that might raise tensions with China, so Baker and his mercenaries are supposed to deal with the situation.

It's one of those movies in which the action is far more important than the events, like Baker's affair with Attenborough's wife, Honor Blackman. It's never clear why Cord is causing trouble. What is clear is that the two are in a life-and-death struggle, and who will survive is the end the movie is pointing to. There's some good location shooting by DP Alan Hume, but director Gordon Flemyng is more interested in entertainment and striking images than story.

The problem with The Last Grenade isn't so much that it's bad, but that it disregards audience expectations. It isn't unreasonable, after all, to expect a movie about mercenaries to contain a fair amount of action. The Last Grenade, however, devotes at least as much attention to a none-too-convincing romantic subplot as to the central rivalry between the characters played by Baker and Cord.

Cord's slightly mad villain is more charismatic than the decidedly unheroic hero, but receives too little screen time to keep the tension going. Even his demise is somewhat of a letdown, with the viewer unaccountably robbed of any explosive, bullet-riddled showdown between the rival groups of mercenaries, so that instead we're given an almost mannered climax that's more of a joke than a catharsis, dramatic music cue notwithstanding.

In less British hands - say, Don Siegel's or Sam Peckinpah's - or maybe John Boorman's or David Lean's, this might have been an unqualified winner; as is, however, it's only a minor, watchable, but ultimately disappointing and mostly actionless actioner.