Condor's Nest

No spoilers. This movie open was so much promise. The first half of the movie is excellent. The protagonist is ruthless and it's consistent with the character. However, the second half of the movie the protagonist turns into a beta male, the girl boss shows up and saves the day, and, the scenes with the Nazis are played to whimsical tone. That's almost a separate movie from the first half. Really disappointing that the movie didn't hold it serious tone throughout the movie. What opened as a movie about Obsession and ruthlessness, degrades into standard adventure, fair and inappropriate whimsical scenes that are not consistent with first half of the movie.

CONDOR'S NEST follows the vengeance quest of an American pilot who watched his crew get murdered by a Nazi and travels through South America killing tons of crazy Nazis to find him. There, that's the plot, and, basically, the entire movie. You're welcome.

THE GOOD: Character actors abound in this one, and they save what otherwise might be a particularly grim affair; every Nazi of significance is played by some talented folks ranging from Jackson Rathbone to Bruce Davison, providing a splash of color to the story.

THE BAD: Lead actor Jacob Keohane does a fine enough job, but finds himself buried by the personalities around him. There's no room for him to breathe emotionally, and we end up with a competent actor playing a one-note character.

THE UGLY: This is, very obviously, not shot in South America.

CONCLUSION: it's fairly entertaining, but if you're looking for Ben Hur you're going to wind up disappointed.

I'll start on a couple of positive notes.

There are two good things about this movie: 1) It's in color, and 2) It ended.

I'd say about 33% of this film is people being held at gunpoint, 33% is people being shot in the head, and the final third is people yelling at each other.

There's one long stretch with Heinrich Himmler (who here looks like a dead ringer for Hitler, which he wasn't in real life) heading up a meeting of 10 or so old Nazis (all speaking German so you have to read the subtitles throughout, whereas it would have been a good place for them to just slip into English with a German accent.

There's a long opening scene in which, after the Americans' bomber crashes near the "front lines" in France but most of the crew survives, a really bad SS guy (you'll recognize him from one of the Mummy movies) shows up, holds the crew at gunpoint, then eventually shoots all of them in the head just for giggles. It sets the thematic tone for the whole movie.

And did I mention poor acting throughout the film? Yeah, it's there and it's pretty consistent.

I dunno - maybe 2 stars is a bit generous for this one.

I guess I got suckered by the trailer. I kept thinking it has to get better but it only got worse. If it was supposed to be a serious drama, it wasn't. If a comedy, there was absolutely nothing funny. If it was to have been historically accurate it completely missed the mark.

Bad dialogue, acting that wasn't convincing, cinematography that was embarrassingly poor and the best editing that could have been done was to cut all of it and throw it away.

When compared to so many of the movies that were produced by Amazon I just don't get why this got the green light.

I definitely wasted my time watching this terrible excuse for a movie.

This began like some of the better WWII flicks and captured our attention. There is intrigue as we ferret out the plot. But somewhere in the middle it degenerated into too much soap opera, with the realization that there was a writers' addiction to regular and over-used pistol-to-the-head killing. The wife quit and left for bed halfway through. I should have, but hoped it would wash out better... it didn't.

There was some good acting, but the overall movie sank, especially near the end where the main character gets hold of a heavy gun and starts killing dozens of bad guys, bad guys with automatic rifles, and that are dumb enough to keep incessantly running into the open in front of him, as comrades fall under their feet.

As realistic and engaging as this thing started, it sure degraded into just another lousy unrealistic shoot ''em up by its finish.