Kelly's Heroes

Sunday, June 22, 2008

I picked this up in a really cheap two-pack with The Dirty Dozen. Kinda hard to resist.

Actually, I hadn't seen this since I was a little kid, and I remembered it as being funnier. It's a big, fun, well-staged war adventure with a great cast, but as a comedy it's only intermittenly funny. That's kind of a shame, because there's a lot to like here. Instead of a comedy, it kind of comes off as a really odd, quirky war movie. I think a shift towards the serious would have helped a bit. As it stands, this is an entertaining movie that seems like it could have been a much better one.

I have no idea what the movie cost, but it looks fairly big budget. And I think it just goes to show that money doesn't help comedy. A bigger budget can help make a lot of movies better in a lot of ways, but it doesn't make a movie any funnier. This is full of tanks and shootouts and explosions and action and all sorts of big WW2 stuff, but that doesn't give any of the punchlines more zing.

So if you watch Kelly's Heroes some time soon, think of it less as a comedy and more as an adventure, and that should help. I know I won't make that mistake again.