By Jeremy Carr.
The repeated, formulaic structure, lack of development, and its insistence on by-the-numbers genre touchstones make for what is merely a passable war movie….”
Murder Company almost immediately recalls many of the war movies produced during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Not the big budget, star-studded epics, but the routine programmers regularly released by studios to feed the basic wartime appetites of audiences. Like those earlier films, Murder Company is lean, straightforward, and largely achieves its rudimentary goal. However, also like its B-grade battlefront percussors, it fails to offer anything unique or innovative. Its plot is simple and simplistic, its characters are one-dimensional, serviceable types, and its style, though containing a few flourishes, is essentially an operative exercise in orthodox coverage.
Director Shane Dax Taylor acknowledged the influence of “men on a mission” movies when making Murder Company, an indebtedness also evident from the start. A small, mixed unit of paratroopers are assembled and given the task of tracking down the Nazi official responsible for transportation in occupied France, particularly the roads and bridges that will be of high value after the Normandy invasion just days away. They are joined by a member of the French resistance, who harbors a personal grudge against said Nazi, and are guided, from the sidelines, by a seasoned general. At just 85 minutes, Murder Company spends little time developing any of these individuals. Played by Gilles Marini, Daquin, the Frenchman, has the most backstory, while Kelsey Grammer, as General Haskel, lends the picture is primary star credential. He isn’t given much to work with, though, and is mainly seen in brief cutaway scenes dispersed among longer sequences involving the five American soldiers played by William Moseley, Pooch Hall, Jilon VanOver, James Wiles, and Joe Anderson.
In lieu of an elaborate narrative or depth of character, Taylor and screenwriter Jesse Mittelstadt instead present a series of perfunctory fight scenes preceded by moments of fleeting downtime, allowing for some digressive banter, followed by the tense seconds just before battle. This three-part sequence of events is put on repeat for most of the film and, though the skirmishes are adequately staged, the repetitiveness quickly grows tiresome. The men engage in standard solider speak and during the lulls in combat are given time to muse on the nature of their assignment, to voice their half-hearted moral qualms, and to consider war in general, but none of this is especially impactful.
Where Taylor and Mittelstadt do succeed is in conveying a discernable earnestness and reverence for fallen comrades, the mission at hand, and the overarching cause. Excepting a fair amount of bloodletting and coarse language, this is where Murder Company most resembles its Classical Hollywood ancestors. The sense of camaraderie is persuasive and the reflections on leadership, duty, and even race are genuine. The lines between good and bad are also clearly demarcated and played to full, if cliched, effect. But again, these scenes don’t last, the performances aren’t great, and it doesn’t take long before the story simply moves on to another attack.
Shot on location in Bulgaria, Murder Company, which supposedly has its origins in a true but secretive mission of which there is no record and no formal acknowledgement, is a fine-looking film. The outdoor photography by Martin Chichov is sharp, the visual effects are decent, and the stunt work is impressive. Its absence of pretension is also laudable as sheer entertainment. But the repeated, formulaic structure, lack of development, and its insistence on by-the-numbers genre touchstones make for what is merely a passable war movie, albeit one with the best of intentions.
Jeremy Carr is a Contributing Editor at Film International and teaches film studies at Arizona State University. He writes for the publications Cineaste, Senses of Cinema, MUBI/Notebook, Cinema Retro, Vague Visages, The Retro Set, The Moving Image, Diabolique Magazine and Fandor. He is the author of Repulsion (1965) from Auteur Publishing and Kubrick and Control from Liverpool University Press a contributor to the collections ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May, from Edinburgh University Press, and David Fincher’s Zodiac: Cinema of Investigation and (Mis)Interpretation, from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.