Overlord (Film Review)

2018 Paramount/Bad Robot Productions
Directed by: Julius Avery; Written by: Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith
Starring: Jovan Adepo, Wyatt Russell, Mathilde Ollivier, John Magaro, Gianny Taufer, Pilou Asbæk, and Bokeem Woodbine
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 110 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 7/10

Sometimes a great horror film is marked by the fact that before the supernatural stuff even begins, the events of the film are horrific. Overlord begins in a plane over the Atlantic on the night before D-Day, as paratroopers face mounting nerves. Seems these guys have to blow up a radio tower inland to ensure success for the beach invasion. The soldiers are live-wires as the plane, as part of a convoy, flies over the massive Allied fleet, and then overland--when the aircraft starts taking enemy fire. The scene is incredibly intense as staged by director, Julius Avery, as the plane of our focus is thrown into chaos, then slowly blown apart. The camera finds and stays with a young soldier played by Jovan Adepo, as he leaps from the craft, and struggles to pull his parachute, tumbling among dogfights, explosions, and enemy machine-gun fire. He barely pulls the cord in time, landing in a dark forest in the midst of the Nazis...and this is just the opening twenty minutes. Would you believe that all of this incredibly shot aerial battle footage is only a prelude to a movie about a small band of surviving soldiers, who come across a Nazi super-soldier experiment in a small French village?
Avery sets up the mounting dread leading to the discovery of the evil German laboratory masterfully. There's a strange carcass on the road to the town. The soldiers hide out in the farmhouse of a kindly, yet feisty woman, who insists that her dear old granny upstairs is just sick. Those coughs and wheezes coming through the floorboards sure sound monstrous, though. Unfortunately, the farmhouse is also where the film bogs down. After Adepo finds the super-solider laboratory during some reconnaissance, the cat's out of the bag, but the soldiers then hang out more in the farmhouse, where they eventually brutally interrogate a Nazi officer. When the good guys finally decide to blow up the lab, which is rather conveniently located right under the tower they need to destroy, it feels like they've been in the farmhouse torturing and deliberating for an eternity.
Overlord would be far more interesting, and the time in the farmhouse far more worthwhile, if the film made more of an effort to distinguish its characters. Often, war films struggle to do this because of the sheer size of their casts. There are only five soldiers around for most of Overlord. They're all likable, and one of them is even played by Kurt Russell's son (and the kid looks like he might have as bright a future as his dad's past), but none of them are memorable enough to burn their names into your head five minutes after the movie's over.
A slightly bigger budget may have also made the film more exciting. The film hints at total mayhem on the scale of its opening for its ending, with deformed super-soldier monsters running amok. Instead, only a few of the grisly bastards get out of their cages before a tower is falling onto their heads. Why tease these guys if they barely get to come out to play? You get a full picture of what they are and what they can do, but you barely get to see them actually do it.
2006's The Descent is already a classic of this young millennium. The film's hour-long setup, a group of distinct young women getting lost in a deep, rural, underground cave system, is terrifying. Then the monsters show up, and the terror goes from white-knuckle, to rip off your fingernails. Overlord grows less scary the more its barely-used monsters are revealed. The film's obviously good-naturedness also ensures the incoming ending will be a happy one. I'm not saying the film has to have as bleak a tone as the pitch-black Descent, but Overlord never really goes all in on its humorous elements, either. It just rides a middle-of-the-road tone that generally creates an ending vibe of "that was okay." If Overlord had delivered on the promises of its opening scenes it could have been an all-time great.