Number 654 on the top 1000 films of all time is the war-comedy drama 'Kelly's Heroes.'
Private Kelly (Clint Eastwood) is a disgraced soldier in a WW2 infantry unit. However, he soon discovers that the Nazis are hiding a huge cache of gold. He rallies together a posse of fellow disillusioned soldiers such as Sergeant Big Joe (Telly Savalas) supply Sergeant 'Crapgame' (Don Rickles) and eclectic hippie 'Oddball' (Donald Sutherland) to steal the gold for themselves.
As far as war-comedy dramas go, Kelly's Heroes very much came and went without much impact. Obviously for me and not for the all people who voted it as the 654th best film of all time. Let's just start with the Clint Eastwood-shaped elephant in the room. As you've heard me say ad nauseum, I don't rate Clint Eastwood as an actor at all. As an old man - he always plays the same old role - a grumpy old man. The same very much applies when he was a young man too. In Kelly's Heroes, he played the usual dry, laconic and sarcastic wiseass. It wore thin twenty films ago.
I didn't much care for the sprawling ensemble cast either. There wasn't really one memorable character or somebody I really wanted to root for. If you really pushed me, maybe I would say I liked Oddball the best - Donald Sutherland was quite enjoyable in the role - although I'm not sure how much an eclectic hippie like Oddball would survive in the army. As for everybody else? Telly Savales...Don Rickles weren't particularly memorable.
The film is also labelled as a comedy too. I didn't find it particularly memorable - I guess most of the humour was supposed to come from the strange mix of characters, but I didn't laugh all that much. It functioned much more effectively as a war drama.
All in all, Kelly's Heroes was really nothing special.
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