Far too noisy,far too long,far from subtle.And it had Lance Percival in it.I don't really need to go on but I shall because "Too late the hero" or 'ero as our professional cockney might have it, is one of the worst kind of movies.The kind that pretend to be one thing but turn out to be quite another.Here we have a bash - crash no prisoners war movie full of squaddies with gritted teeth firing machine guns at other squaddies with gritted teeth accompanied by belicose music ,dramatic sunlight through the trees and much crunching of the undergrowth.One by one the good guys are killed off until only the professional cockney and the smug yank are left and then there's a rousing climax as they race across a huge expanse of open ground the Brits have inexplicably left unmined outside their camp until one of them gets his and the other collapses at the feet of his lantern - jawed C.O. who clenches his teeth manfully.OK.It's a Robert Aldrich war movie,a sort of "Dirty Half Dozen",but hey,now it's 1968 man,it's not cool any more to make war movies,let's pretend we've made an anti - war movie and really clean up. And so they did.Don't be fooled,this is not an anti - war movie any more than it's big brother "The Dirty Dozen" was.A handful of misfits and psychos take on an impossible mission led by a misfit and a psycho. Ground - breaking stuff it isn't.Lance Percival tries a bewildering range of accents before settling on a vaguely Scottish lilt but cannot compete with full - on nutter Ronald Fraser or frankly weird Ian Bannen in the "Barmy Jock" stakes.Our favourite cockney veers between Bob Hoskins and John Gielgud as the whim takes him.Denholm Elliot sweats far too much to make a convincing officer,"We have a place in Wiltshire" he tells Cliff Robertson who absorbs this nugget unblinkingly Robertson himslf changes from a man willing to resign his commission rather than go into combat to a gung - ho battle - hardened leader of men in the space of ten minutes.Whatever he's on they should have given the whole U.S. Army and the war would have been over by 1942. The worst film about the war in the East since "Never so few".