Overlord: Film Review

Overlord: Film Review

Cast: Jovan Adepo, Wyatt Russell, Mathilde Ollivier
Director: Julius Avery

Drawing more in truth from Bethesda Studios' video game Wolfenstein (complete with side missions - raid the castle, kill the baddies) than Dod Sno and revelling in its B-movie aspirations, Overlord is here for nothing but a good time.

Even if it could, in honesty, have lost 20 minutes of its near 2 hour run time.

A truly stunning and visceral opening drops a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears US troopers into France on June 6th 1944 - their sole mission is to take out a radio tower built on top of a church so the Allied Invasion can take place.

But they're not prepared for what their small number finds in the village...

Overlord starts brilliantly - the tension's ratcheted up as the troops get ready to make their drop, and the inevitable plays out. Meshing the war tropes with the everyman soldiers (and their cursory dialogue to give a degree of sympathy when they're offed) works well for it - but once it hits the ground, it doesn't run, but slightly stumbles in terms of pacing.

And while the B-movie body horror aspirations are on show early on, it's a full two-thirds of the film before Avery unleashes all the monster mash elements into a series of set pieces that bring the gore and jump scares, but not the over-show.

The science falls by the way side, and the allegories over Nazis and hell (talk early on of jackals, a tracking shot of a Jesus statue burning in a fire) are ramped up. Its only interest is in dispatching the "rotten sons of bitches" and in truth, Avery does it well, neither scrimping on what's expected or overplaying what's hinted.

It's a mix that works largely well, thanks in part to Adepo's sensitive everyman, man-with-a-moral-compass trooper, who tries to do the right thing, but finds, that in war, that's not always the best thing to do.

The body horror ramps up for the finale, one which can ludicrously be seen a way off, and feels like a cross between Wolfenstein, creature feature and a 2000AD story, but still manages to deliver what's expected.

Overlord is very much a case of a film that does exactly what it says on the tin, even if it does feel occasionally like it's holding back as it treads a fine line on the genre tightropes it's walking. The atmosphere is sustained throughout (even though earlier mentioned expeditious trim could have helped) and to be frank, while there are threads that could build a universe, as a stand-alone, one-off Nazi-killin, war story, brothers-in-arms, supernatural mix, it all comes together for an entertaining, if disposable, good time.