Force 10 from Navarone

Director Guy Hamilton manages over the course of almost two hours to keep his audience on edge. For a finale he has a double whammy destruction of a giant Yugoslav dam which sets loose forces of nature that crumble a seemingly indestructible bridge. Harrison Ford does a creditable job as the American Colonel; Fox is excellent as the British demolitions expert; Carl Weathers gives a powerful performance as the unwanted black GI who proves himself in more ways than one. Barbara Bach, lone femme, does fine in a tragic, patriotic role as a Partisan. Franco Nero as a Nazi double agent who fools the Partisans is slickly nefarious.

Force Ten honors all the obligatory clichés, and then there's a nice twist involving the explosion inside the dam, and then we get the special effects, and then it's over. It doesn't leave much of an impression; a director like Guy Hamilton, a graduate of four of the Bond pictures, can turn out action movies like this in his sleep. This time, alas, that's apparently what he did.

Force 10 is funny, but not quite funny enough: too often one laughs at its implausibilities without knowing if the filmmakers are in on the joke. The old-fashioned script by Robin Chapman has just enough tongue in cheek so that the cliches can be taken as irony, but Guy Hamilton's direction tips the balance toward cliche. An old hand at engineering actors in and out of impossible pickles, Hamilton keeps the action going, but the surprises are so mechanically executed that they rarely amaze. [18 Dec 1978, p.85]

The action sequences, especially the climax, are painfully deficient, one of the many demerits of Hamilton's dull direction. Only the cast makes this worth catching for less demanding fans of the war genre.

The plot of Force 10 is banally improbable. Guy Hamilton's direction is sluggish and the camera work, by Chris Challis, makes the least of the picturesque locations in the mountains of Montenegro. There is, moreover, an unmistakable air of haste and cost-cutting that suggests that most of the production budget went to pay the high-priced stars.

Under Hamilton's moribund direction, this becomes a Bond-in-uniform saga, with a can-they-spike-the-Kraut-guns-in-time plot. All the potentially exciting set pieces (traitor in our midst, whose side are the Gucci-clad partisans on?) are thrown away with a disregard for the basic mechanics of suspense, and the climax is literally cardboard thin.

If any one made a respectable effort to invest this story with authenticity or tension it is not apparent on the screen. Even the big spectacle, the demolition of a dam, is going to look unimpressive to moviegoers who've already been to Superman and seen the identical illusion depicted with far more skill. Force 10 is a mission that should probably have been aborted. Instead it's been allowed to abort on the screen.