The story begins with new and powerful events, where the story tells of a leading general charged with a historic task of meeting military prisoners on death row or long missions for a dangerous mission. The man might ask these people to stand behind enemy lines and cause chaos to the German generals, which could be more risky and more dangerous.
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.
One could, no doubt, if sufficiently determined, see all this as some deep, dark (in fact, practically subterranean) satire on the military mind. But there's precious little evidence of irony in Robert Aldrich's direction or the script.
A raw and preposterous glorification of a group of criminal soldiers who are trained to kill and who then go about this brutal business with hot, sadistic zeal is advanced in The Dirty Dozen, an astonishingly wanton war film.
Jeffrey M. Anderson
Common Sense Media
March 18, 2011
Aldrich manages to use his time well, focusing on character traits and never letting the pace become bogged down.
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.
