Don’t Breathe (2016)
A good analogy for this film is playing a video game on "Easy" mode. Every item or door that will be important is zoomed in on and highlighted just before you need it. Everything a character says is going to "surprisingly" become relevant later. There is no depth, no development, everything is on rails. The big difference is a video game still requires you to use a bit of intelligence to navigate it, whereas this film requires that you NOT think.
There are so many stupid turns in the story that I had to start playing on my phone halfway through to stop from pulling it apart too much. I was getting dumber watching these bumbling criminals with no semblance of a plan attempt to outwit a blind man who somehow thinks a gun is his best weapon. This film would be an insult to any true veterans who watched it.
Perhaps the worst thing is that there's really no one to root for. Initially, I was on the side of the disabled man defending his home from 3 scumbags. So of course the writers have to add a dirty secret so that the robbers don't look so bad by comparison. But really, they still don't have any admirable qualities compared to him. The trailer is amazing because it edits out all the bits that show what stupid, horrible people the thieves are. Ugg. Screw this movie.
The Dirty Dozen (1967)
Another flick I watched for Veteran's Day, this one was the original suicide squad. Like the director's other films, I think this one is a bit long and indulgent. I think there's a great fan-edit to be made here by trimming lots of takes to make it move faster, and cutting parts of the beginning and ending. It's a really interesting movie though, that essentially is an idealogical battle between different parts of the US military. I knew a guy who had grown up the biggest military nut you could imagine... could identify the sounds of different plane engines, joined ROTC, took apart and cleaned his own guns, subscribed to Soldier of Fortune magazine. He joined the Marine Corps and couldn't stand it. He said that their whole mission was to break you down and turn you into somebody who didn't think and just followed the stupid ideas of everyone higher up. These are the kind of guys we're following in The Dirty Dozen.
One of the surprises of the film for me was finding out about Clint Walker. Apparently famous for the western series Cheyenne, I didn't know he was supposed to be playing a Native American in this until I just watched that trailer I linked! Dude was a real life superhero though, built like a greek god and more interested in outdoors stuff than acting. He was fascinating to read about...had a ski accident where his heart was pierced by a ski pole and he was pronounced dead... then he came back and lived another 20+ years! What a legend.
Very little of the film is action, mostly it's a battle for the souls of these men who were thrown away by the military. Each of them cracked under the military's rules, and committed various offences. Some of them more or less justified, but the ideological battle plays out between the higher-ups as well, about the value of discipline and cleanliness and following orders versus using men's own resources, their creativity and innovation, and finding what will personally motivate them rather than demanding they do everything a set way. It's a good film for teachers, too! Ha ha!
One thing that's hard to appreciate watching it for the first time now is how many tropes it was following versus how many it possibly created. There are a lot here, from the "they gotta become a team" to the rapist being obviously creepy (rather than say, a charming well-dressed frat boy) to one member being a persistent @$$#ole the whole story to random bad guys coming out of nowhere at the end. Plus the ending scene here is famously homaged in Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds. It's also clear that this is just before the end of the Hays Code, as they're sure not to actually show some of the things the soldiers were up to, and that only "good" guys survive. Despite that annoying framing of the story, standout performances by Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson anchor this film enough to make it hold up today.