Overlord: Julius Avery

It was a mean trick for J. J. Abrams and Paramount Pictures to make a pitch-perfect Wolfenstein movie and not tell anybody. It was an even dirtier trick for them to bury it in early November under a false name with a lukewarm, underwhelming advertising campaign. Here I sit in the aftermath, trying to wrap my head around Julius Avery’s Overlord, a film that scratches a very particular itch I doubt many people know needs scratching. Centering on a ragtag group of conspicuously multiracial 82nd Airborne paratroopers—the United States Armed Forces weren’t actually desegregated until 1948—the film begins much like a Samuel Fuller infantry flick bloated with a proper Hollywood budget, watching as they parachute from an exploding bomber behind enemy lines in occupied France. Their mission: invade a small village and neutralize a Nazi radio tower, thereby freeing Allied air support for the Normandy invasion. Avery holds his cards close to his chest at first, luring us in with several white-knuckle sequences of infantry heroics that wouldn’t feel out of place in an HBO miniseries. (The Fuller comparisons are particularly strong in a minefield sequence reminiscent of Fixed Bayonets! and in their gruff, cynical CO who seems the lost cousin of Gene Evans’ Sergeant Zack in The Steel Helmet.) But when they finally get to the village, mad science starts to bleed through the realism as they discover that the tower is actually a front for a secret Nazi laboratory hard at work on an immortality serum. Before we can get our bearings the paratroopers are fighting literal Nazi zombies, complete with all the gleeful, exploitative carnage such a preposterous scenario would suggest. Overlord is a perfect example of great execution trumping originality, as the script leans hard on stock characters that were worn out by the late 40s: the mama’s boy hero with an unflappable moral code, the French peasant woman who aids the GIs, the monstrous SS officer, the plump, bespectacled Nazi scientist. They even have a gum-chewing, wise-cracking Italian! But the pleasure in Overlord comes from Avery’s wide-eyed enthusiasm for his absurd material, playing everything—even the bits about Nazi zombies—completely straight. We never get the sense that he’s rolling his eyes at anything, even when a super-powered Nazi fistfights a super-powered paratrooper in the third act. Overlord is the rare genre film done perfectly right.

Rating: 8/10