Rapiniamo il Duce

The quality of the cinematics is good and the historical details too. The faces all match the characters and the acting is good - all but for Castellitto Jr who is kind of unwatchable so bad he is this spoiled brat!

The best character who made the movie interesting is Maccio's.

The best acting is that of the fascist general, who is a new face for me in Italian cinema, but very interesting.

The song arrangements were also good and, let's say, 'innovative classics'!

A bit predictable development and ending, but still better than the usual action hollywood movies of the past 15 years.

I feel that there are excess of Nazi based movies in the history of cinema and too few Fascist based movies because of one big reason: with the Nazis, hollywood can show Americans fighting evil, but with Fascist they would have to acknowledge the big role of Socialist freedom fighters! Usual obscurantist hypocrisy.

Sometimes a movie leaves you with some thoughts to think about, the other times it leaves you with nothing, as if you've never watched a movie at all. Rapiniamo il Duce is sadly closer to the latter but not without its buts too.

Ever since I started learning Italian, their movies were mostly misses for me; it's an expressive language and for the most part I just couldn't grab what the characters are saying - and I was just reading the subtitles! - but this one was different. Maybe because it was produced for Netflix but I just didn't feel like it was really made for Italians and that's on the negative side actually. The whole movie seems like an American remake but with an all-Italian cast and that dissonance is palpable starting the first minutes.

On the positive side though Rapiniamo il Duce is a stylish, fast-paced heist drama with fantastic inclusions of animated segments and 1940s appropriate soundtrack but it lacks consistency and the setting (last days of WWII) is only there to bring a feeling of urgency into narrative, not to be a leading vehicle for it. Main characters are no names that we know little to nothing about and therefore are not capable to empathize with anyone - the story plays out so fast it hasn't got time to draw backstories longer than a sentence or a five second clip and that rush is all over the place. The jokes would've been a well-fitting addition and probably the life saver for the movie but they don't exist here as well.

All in all this is a well-crafted movie that looks marvelous on paper, as a comic book adaptation but as a standalone feature it is as lifeless as its main characters.

Don't take this so seriously and don't expect too much. The actors delivered a very good performance. The substance of the story lacks and some cheesy holes let's questions open.

The spoken language is cool and the music remembers at times the war movies of the sixties. I don't think this movie is based on true events. The way they attacked the head quarter was really too easy to get in.

The costumes and sceneries were well created.

Nice landscapes at the end and who knows if there wil ever be a sequel.

Finally I spent anyway an entertaining time cause I have for the moment really not more options to see on Netflix.

5/10.

There's nothing so wrong with this movie that it ever becomes unwatchable, but there isn't really a good reason to watch it, either. It starts off fine, but as it went on, I became increasingly restless. The number of derivative and predictable plot elements really started to pile up, and the pacing felt off.

The worst part, I thought, was that they didn't really do much with the premise. This is an Italian movie set during the end of World War II, and they barely even used that setup. It could have been set in the United States during the Civil War or Prohibition, and there probably wouldn't need to be many changes.

The characters were likeable, though, and it hits all the notes that you expect a heist comedy to hit.

This is a fun movie if you don't take it too seriously. Without question, it borrows from all kinds of other movies. The characters are more like caricatures than rounded characters. The main plot involves a heist of gold and other treasures hoarded by the Mussolini regime to fund his war campaign when they were still allies of the German Nazis. The story takes place during the last days of the Second World War, just prior to Mussolini's dethronement.

The movie features elements you may recognize: Among the good guys: the heist organizer, the sharp-shooter, the alluring young lady, the acrobat, the code-breaker, the race-car driver, and the anarchist.

Among the baddies: the sadistic fascist officer, his wife, a washed-up Hollywood-type actress, and his henchman.

The settings: an officer's palace, a hideout, a militaristic compound with its prisoners and hoard of treasure.

Pietro Lamberti is the amoral entrepreneur who has been trying to sell arms to different militaristic factions with albeit mixed results. His code breaker, Amedeo, intercepts a transmission that Mussolini's hidden treasure might be lifted and taken to Switzerland by one of his high-ranking officers. They know they're going to lose the war, so why not take the money and run? Pietro decides, instead of trading in arms, maybe they can steal the gold.

In true Ocean's 11 style, we hear Pietro's voice-over as he describes the different people he wants to recruit for the heist. Each has a brief scene which tells us who they are, more or less. Sound familiar? There's even a scene which is a throw-back to Sergio Leone's "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly".

True to these kinds of movies, Federal Secretary Borsalino, a sadistic high-ranking officer in Mussolini's regime, runs the Dead Zone. The Dead Zone is a military complex where not only the gold is stashed but where prisoners, both political and military, are incarcerated, some awaiting execution. Borsalino is having an extra-marital affair with a young singer, who also happens to be the lover of Pietro! He is planning to take the gold and the girl no less for himself.

His estranged wife, Nora Cavalieri, is a throw-back to Old Hollywood, but now her career is on the skids because she's older and can no longer play young female characters. She also knows about the gold and the younger woman.

The result is an entertaining and enjoyable fantasy flick where all the different nutty characters interplay. A few twists and turns make the story a bit unpredictable. And as I said at the beginning, if audiences don't take it too seriously, it's 90 minutes of entertaining cinema. Is it based on a true story, as implied? Probably not.