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The McKenzie BreakRating:
Release Date: 14 August, 2001 Retail Price: $14.95 OUR Price: $12.99 You SAVE: $1.96! Cast: Complete Cast (10 total) |
The McKenzie Break Reviews
Great Movie, but who wrote Amazon's plot synopsis??????
A very good and entertaining action movie, with a bit of a twist in that it is taken from a different point of view with German POWS in a British camp. Recommended.
Who though wrote the synopsis for Amazon?? The camp is in Scotland, not "Northern England". Even southern Scotland is north of "Northern England". Also what is a "U-Boat Commander Kreigsmarine Captain"? It's actually spelled Kriegsmarine and translates to "Navy" in English. So we have (with misspellings) a "U-Boat Commander Navy Captain". A bit redundant no?
Recommendations: to those interested in a good rainy Saturday entertainment, buy this DVD; to the person who wrote this synopsis I suggest you buy a map of Britain and a German to English Dictionary.
McKenzie Break
There's a riot going on in Scotland during the waning years of World War II. The German prisoners in an Allied POW camp are laying siege to the compound and the War Office is getting a little frustrated and more than a little worried. To investigate and quell the situation they decide to send the hard-living, hard-loving, rule-breaking Irish Captain Jack Connor to the scene.
Brian Keith plays Connor in this odd POW drama that more or less turns the genre on its head. The inmates, led by U-boat commander Kapitänleutnant Willi Schlüter (Helmut Griem), are clearly in charge of the situation (darn those Geneva Convention rules!) and the Brits are a whisker away from having a Major Situation on their hands.
Enter Jack Connor, a man not only with a plan but enough insight to perhaps do more for the war effort than bring order and discipline to an isolated prison camp. You see, this is a POW movie, so there are tunnels being dug and breaks being plotted. And there's a big, iron fish to land at the end of that break. If only....
I'm a big fan of Brian Keith and, having watched and loved the first season dvd-set of `Have Gun, Will Travel,' most episodes of which were directed by Lamont Johnson, I was pretty excited about THE MCKENZIE BREAK. Keith is fine in this - as is Griem as his major nemesis, I hasten to add - and Johnson ably handles the action. I wanted to love a movie that turns a genre inside-out, but I ended up only liking it. I thought it something a little more than improbable that the Allies would be so delicate about Geneva Convention rules that they would so lose control of a prison camp. That was the big improbability hurdle I had to overcome, although this movie is studded with them. Add to that a rather ambiguous and inconclusive ending and I can't help feeling disappointed. Considering the talent involved, this one should have soared. As it is, THE MCKENZIE BREAK is a solid, albeit unspectacular, movie.
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