Well, since Tarantino's remake is in the air, the accessibility of this film has widened a bit, and I managed to catch a midnight showing. If you're a fan of Italian Exploitation this will do well for you pretty much from frame one. I'm not so much of a fan, but indeed found this movie to be quite the entertaining adventure. And in fact that was what was so wonderful about it--lose the moralizing of most WWII movies, lose a lot of the American hero myth making.... um, lose a bit of the Italians', uh, involvement in it, apparently..... and you get boys with toys blowing up bridges and cackling madly the whole way.<br /><br />I especially liked Nick. In a group of rascals, he out-rascalled all of them with his smooth moves, quirky facial expressions, and rogueish ways. He's a little like what Steve McQueen would have been if Steve McQueen was ugly and not a badass. Otherwise, exactly like Steve McQueen. I also couldn't help but enjoy the shout-out to blaxploitation in the character of Tony, who kicked ass and took names.<br /><br />Being the exploity goodness it is, there's also broads. During precisely zero of the scenes involving broads did the broads make sense. Figures.<br /><br />Anyway, the tagline sez "Whatever the Dirty Dozen did, they did it dirtier" is true to the point that these guys have a lot more fun and a lot less issue with what they're doing, but I still find the ending to the Dirty Dozen to be extremely morally defunct, whereas the excited escapism of this movie doesn't really serve towards such a dark ending. So yeah, at least these guys were a little cinematically removed from the Total War aspect of ol' dubyadubyaeyeeye. These guys are literally dirtier while being less gritty.<br /><br />--PolarisDiB