Review By Jon Donnis
The year is 1945, a US military cargo plane has lost control and crashed behind enemy lines, deep in a German forest.
Major Johnson (played by the always strange looking Mickey Rourke) decides to send in a squad of top soliders on a top secret resuce mission, but not to rescue the lost soldiers, but to rescue the secrets that the cargo plane was transporting.
Leading the squad is the always impressive Robert Knepper as Sergeant Brewer, and make no mistake, for most of this film, Knepper is the star. Along with Walsh (Jackson Rathbone), the squad travel deep into the forest to look for the crash site.
After finding Nazi soldiers hung up in the trees, and other dead bodies with strange ancient symbols on them, your first thought might be that we have a film in the mold of The Predator, but alas no, instead of a killer alien, we have a bunch of supernatural witches instead. Bit disappointed there to be honest.
The squad's compasses start to fail, members start to see weird things, and before you know it, they are being attacked by the earlier mentioned witches after they find the crashed cargo plane.
What follows this is a bit of a mystery, thriller, find out the secrets, stop the Nazis from finding it, destroy the Tree of Life, and take out the Witches. You get the idea.
I wonder if Mickey Rourke is going down the Bruce Willis route these days? Small parts in films, do a few scenes on your own, and then have those scenes mixed in with the rest of the film. Get paid a load of money, have your face front and centre on the poster, and job done.
As mentioned earlier, for a lot of the film the most interesting character was played by Robert Knepper, but he isn't there towards the end, as of course Mickey Rourke has to come in, save the day etc. And then you get the completely obvious "twist" in the final scene.
In general this is quite a good film, it is well acted, interesting characters, the action scenes are good, the visual effects are of a decent quality.
The Bad
Completely pointless having Mickey Rourke in this film, his character could have been played by anyone, and it would not have made a difference. Also some of the scenes at the very start and at the very end of the film are so dark. Now dark scenes in films are fine if watching on a cinema screen, or a huge TV at home, while sat in the dark. But for general viewing it is a problem.
Overall
A decent action film, can be a bit clichéd at times, and I really would have preferred them fighting off a crazy alien instead of witches, but at least they tried something different.
You will watch this film once, and then forget about it, but you will probably enjoy it too.
I score WarHunt a solid 7/10
