Somewhere, a corner of Great Britain is still mentally fighting the second world war. Nothing else explains how this kind of wanly acted, flyboys-sock-it-to-the-Boche autopilot outing could attract funding in the 2020s. It has the full deck of cliches: the missus back in Blighty popping up in flashback to pep up the beleaguered hero, fortuitously positioned breast-pocket contents foiling death, and ailing squaddies staying behind with their finger on the trigger: “Go! Somebody needs to stay here to make sure this place goes up!”
The plucky hero is RAF Captain Robert Banks (Joseph Millson), ordered to parachute into occupied south-east France to infiltrate a Nazi bunker where a French resistance leader, Pierre Lavigne (Ronan Summers), is possibly being held. The intelligence is probably reliable because it comes from Lavigne’s English wife Ivy (Rebecca Scott), an old schoolfriend of Banks’s now heading up an insurgent cell in her husband’s absence. Hopefully, real-life military intelligence would assign Banks more precise objectives than “make a nuisance of yourself”.
War Blade makes modest advances on the multilingual front, with Scott trading English and French dialogue as she handles the two factions; there is also Saskia (Alina Tamara), a German nurse who has escaped from the bunker, on the team. A tighter situational frame, rather than the marauding action-adventure format, might have helped writer-director Nicholas Winter focus his modest budget. Not only does it lay open the financial shortcomings, but it leaves room for dithering characterisation that fires blanks with the Chekhov’s guns it sets up. Winter leads with Ivy as a hard-ass guerrilla, but she turns out to be a useless encumbrance; supposed hothead explosives expert Charlie (Michael McKell) is a soppy romantic.
This pointless, aimless mission is expedited by the usual logic-slips, like inexplicably letting fanatical SS officers escape when you have them at your mercy. There is one nicely handled FX shot, which looks like it was done old-school with modelwork, of a tank tumbling into an abyss. But the ground – not sturdy enough to support either band of brothers high drama or pulpy Reichsploitation – has long since gone from underneath this dud.
• War Blade is available on 15 January on digital platforms.
