Critic Reviews

Aldrich was a master at presenting his distinctly cynical outlook in the context of crowd-pleasing entertainment, and The Dirty Dozen is one of his most effective and lasting efforts.

Unarguably one of the great war movies of all time.

Aldrich appears to be against everything: anti-military, anti-Establishment, anti-women, anti-religion, anti-culture, anti-life. Overriding such nihilism is the super-crudity of Aldrich's energy and his humour, sufficiently cynical to suggest that the whole thing is a game anyway, a spectacle that demands an audience.

Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson in the same picture. How much more bad-assedness do you need?

Lee Marvin heads a very strong, nearly all-male cast in an excellent performance.

Director Robert Aldrich gets convincingly raw, tough performances in even the smallest roles.

There are some nice, amusing scenes, especially when one of the dozen (Donald Sutherland) pretends to be a general and inspects some troops. In fact, right up to the last scene the movie is amusing, well paced, intelligent.

The Dirty Dozen flows nicely, keeping things moving and drawing the audience along in its rapid current

Robert Aldrich dissects the underlying ideas with just enough craft and thoughtfulness to make the implications of this gritty 1966 war drama unsettling in not entirely constructive ways.

It is overlong, uneven and frequently obscure, but will succeed by virtue of its sustained action, even though what it attempts to say, if anything, remains elusive.