Wild Geese II (1985)

Director: Peter R. Hunt

Writers: Daniel Carney, Reginald Rose

Composer: Roy Budd

Starring: Scott Glenn, Barbara Carrera, Edward Fox, Laurence Olivier, Robert Webber, Robert Freitag, Kenneth Gaigh, Stratford Jones, Derek Thompson, Paul Antrim, John Terry, Ingrid Pitt, Patrick Stewart

More info:  IMDb

Tagline:  They're back! In the most spectacular rescue mission ever filmed!

Plot: 

My rating: 7.5/10

Will I watch it again? Yes.

What's up with that low IMDb score?  I haven't read any reviews to find out but I really enjoyed this.  This is a sequel to THE WILD GEESE (1978) in name only.  None of the characters return.  Richard Burton was set to return but his death threw a monkey wrench into that situation.  Instead, they hire Edward Fox to play his brother.  Smart move.  It's the role Burton would've played and he would've been woefully miscast.  Fox was the perfect choice.

Scott Glenn (can you believe he's 81 already?) as John Haddad kills it as an emotionless (mostly; he does smile once or twice), get-things-done, mercenary who is the best there is next to Alex Faulkner (wonderfully played by Edward Fox).  These two guys are VERY good at what they do and I admire characters like that regardless of what side they're on.  The first hour has a lot of setup and even though you could justify a lot of it as filler, it's intriguing, offers some great suspense and it's entertaining.  I really loved spending time with Haddad and Faulkner.  You might think that there are too many subplots but that's one thing I dug because the scenes and layers gave us time to see how these characters think, behave and problem solve.  So then once they kidnapping happens (which the audience knows next to nothing about the details of the mission), You don't have to think about maybe how complicated the plan is.

Poor Ingrid.  How the mighty have fallen.

In the middle, there's about a twenty minute chunk devoted to the team's training.  It's not done like what you'd see in other big budget pictures that need to get the team up to speed.  Oh, no, no, no.  This one slyly shows us yet another layer or two about how many steps ahead Haddad and Faulkner are and the payoff (with someone's death) is bold.  Director Peter Hunt's fight scenes are excellent.  There's a scene early on where Haddad is kicking some ass and the scene and editing plays out like Hunt's groundbreaking sped up fighting he did in the Bond pictures of the 60s.  I really miss that technique.  As far as I can remember, this movie is the most recent one that uses it.

So what's left in the movie is removing Hess from the prison and out of the country and the aftermath.  The actual mission is good but not great.  This is the weaker moment in the film, but I still dug it.   It would've been nice had it taken place during the day.  The ending has Hess (Olivier, in one of his final roles) gives an impassioned speech to his new captors.  He makes a good argument.  The last couple of minutes are too light in tone for my taste.  After what happened over the last two hours, it would've been nice to end the film either ambiguous or on a somber note.  The cast does a marvelous job.  Stratford Johns (as the rotund and jovial, Mustapha El Ali) embodied Sydney Greenstreet so well that he would've been a perfect choice for playing Kasper Gutman in THE MALTESE FALCON (1941).  This is a very good thriller despite the actual mission not being as good as what preceded it.