There are some stories you can do a hundred times and they never get old. This is one of them. Band of misfits comes together as a team and achieves the impossible. That’s gold. It gives room to introduce 12 (really 13) interesting characters, full of quirks and personality, then it moves them onto a plot-driving obstacle. The Dirty Dozen isn’t my favorite version of this ever (I tend to prefer the Western or Samaria variety) but it’s good for what it is.
The cast is tremendous and varied. It’s strange seeing John Cassavetes, Donald Sutherland, Jim Brown, and Telly Savales all on screen together. Given the number of characters to juggle, it does a good job giving them all backstories. And, in typical Hollywood fashion, almost all of the men get a story that allows them to still be heroic when needed. They’re bad guys but not bad guys.
What’s most interesting to me about this is how much it feels like the major studios doing everything they could to hold back The New Hollywood and still not succeeding. This is the same year as The Graduate and Bonnie & Clyde. It’s the year the auteur-driven New Hollywood really broke through. The Dirty Dozen has the feel of a movie made with old studio logic. It’s an epic length (2h30m). It’s more produced than directed. However, there is an edge to it. It’s like watching the first time a rap song got put into a fast-food commercial. MGM is trying to make something less safe. This is pricklier than a Magnificent Seven. But it does lean back into a lot of the black-and-white, hero-or-villain tropes of the earlier era. It’s interesting to think about where The Dirty Dozen fits in an evolution from The Great Escape in 1963 to The Wild Bunch in 1969.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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