My wife is a saint. Most, a week after giving birth to a baby, wouldn’t let you sneak out to go watch a movie about reanimated Nazis, but my wife isn’t most people, so here I am reviewing Wolfenstein the Movie—sorry, Overlord—a highly entertaining and often intense WWII thriller… that just happens to be about reanimated Nazis.
The great and surprising thing about Overlord, directed by Julius Avery, is that it works effectively as legitimate WWII mission film. It opens with an incredibly intense and well executed D-Day sequence that defies its limited budget and introduces us to a band of unlikely soldiers who will go on to fight those pesky Nazis, reanimated or not. Avery treats the material as a serious war movie and Overlord benefits as a result; the movie is fast, suspenseful and exciting.
In fact, much of the movie could easily pass for a straightforward war flick—which is probably why an elderly audience member only got up to leave an hour or so in, once the film’s true colors begin to reveal themselves (something to do with reanimated Nazis, if you missed that part).
Oddly, another man entered the theater around that moment and sat down to watch the final 30 minutes.
Reanimated Nazis give, and reanimated Nazis take.
Overlord is graced with a strong case that includes Jovan Adepo, Wyatt Russell and Mathilde Ollivier. Still, the film’s weakest aspect is its characters—while perfectly fine, Overlord relies on pretty cliché character tropes—including the hesitant one, the hardened badass, the mouthy Italian, etc. Avery probably could have cut a few minutes of the soldiers shouting at one another and no one, certainly me, would have minded.
Still, there isn’t much to find fault with. As a WWII movie, Overlord is pretty badass. As a movie about reanimated Nazis, Overlord is pretty badass. My wife… she, too, is badass for letting me out of the house to see it.
Review by Erik Samdahl unless otherwise indicated.