"The Wild Geese" presents a terrific concept, a cast of well-known players who work well together, and crisp cinematography by Jack Hildyard that takes full advantage of the sun-bleached African veldt. So it's a disappointment the filmmakers couldn't make something worth watching.<br /><br />Based on a novel by Daniel Carney, "The Wild Geese" presents Col. Faulkner (Richard Burton), a hard-drinking soldier of fortune still shaking off the pain from losing good-guy African leader Julius Limbani (Winston Ntshona) to a cruel dictator years ago. But Limbani remains alive, and a British tycoon offers Faulkner big money to get Limbani out of prison and to safety.<br /><br />Burton looks about ready to keel over, but he's still Burton, convincing in his command, and he's backed up by Richard Harris, Roger Moore, and Hardy Kruger as his officers. Alas, the film never gels. Director Andrew V. McLaglen, good in the 1960s at marrying action-adventure and comedy, seems lost playing to a grittier '70s sensibility, and with a script that presents the mercenaries with one bloody setback after another. A message of racial brotherhood is advanced by Ntshona and Kruger with some jaw-droppingly bad dialogue, as Kruger's South African character, Coetze, drops his deep-rooted racism after a few minutes of carrying Limbani on his back.<br /><br />"We need each other, white man, and that's the way it should be," Limbani says.<br /><br />"You're beginning to sound good to me," Coetze replies. "Maybe we need you. Maybe you're just the man."<br /><br />Coetze's transformation is way too pat. Also pat is the way a fort full of soldiers is eradicated in broad daylight by spraying cyanide into a barrack full of sleeping soldiers. In broad daylight? <br /><br />Things don't exactly purr along for the mercenaries after that, but even the complications feel forced and unnatural. So do Moore's trademark groan-inducing witticisms and a homosexual medic played by Kenneth Griffith who flounces about the mercenaries' training camp and writes out a will leaving everything to his proctologist.<br /><br />Pluses include a key plot twist in the middle of the film and a sequence when Moore drops his smarm long enough to make a mobster eat a bag of heroin at gunpoint. Harris and Burton have such good chemistry its surprising they only worked together this one time. And the film makes decent use of a deep supporting cast of top-flight Brits, including Barry Forster, Jack Watson, and Stewart Granger as Faulkner's steely employer.<br /><br />But you know you are in trouble in the first minute of the film, when rocker Joan Armatrading tries to channel Joan Baez with an utterly tuneless ballad while a 007-ish title sequence flashes up images of suffering Africans. Never mind most of the suffering Africans we see thereafter are the guys being shot to death by Burton & crew - it looks like McLaglen had the same eight guys get shot over and over to save money and hoped no one would notice. "The Wild Geese" promises two-fisted entertainment, but what you get instead too soft-headed to work on even the shallowest of levels.