Hubby’s Review: Company of Heroes (Netflix), movie, 2013

Hi there readers. Hubby here and I have just (as of 25 August 2022) finished watching COMPANY OF HEROES on Netflix. This is a 2013 direct to video movie that is seemingly based on the squad based strategy game franchise with the same title. 

Short review: 

What I liked more: intense action, battles from the earlier part of the movie, Vinnie Jones’s character, tightly paced plot, oh look it’s SGT Horvath from Saving Private Ryan!

What I liked less: cheap looking visual effects, barely memorable characters,  loses the “identity” of the games after the first act.

Recommendation: it’s ok. A decent time waster. But not something I would go out of my way to watch. 

Long review:

Company of Heroes is a strategy game where you control squads of soldiers and equipment, carrying out missions in a world war 2 setting. Basically it is a distillation of any battle scene from any world war 2 Hollywood movie. What does set it apart from other strategy games is its focus on the squad gameplay where battles are more determined by your micromanaging various units and assets. 

Of course a movie would not just be an hour and a half of battle sequences (though I wouldn’t be opposed to such a thing), but the plot here just feels like it would fit in better in a different movie just not an adaptation of “Company of Heroes”. The plot starts with a unit sent on a mission across the European countryside. The first couple of battles are great! Really got the feel of the squad based gameplay with different soldiers performing different roles, covering each other, fire support etc. just that partway through, the movie’s first issue rears it’s ugly head: it is obviously a lower budgeted production. 

I couldn’t find info on what the budget was but it is evident on screen to be quite low. Explosions, muzzle flashes and other pyrotechnics are definitely CGI explosions done hurriedly with off the shelf software. The way the shots are framed, with a lot of close ups and barely any wide establishing shots give the impression that they were trying to hide the small sets and cast. In a sense, it brings me back to those cheap random named movies on weekday afternoon tv. But who knows, maybe it was intentional? To replicate the computer graphics of the game?

After that first big battle though, anything resembling the game disappears. The squad dwindles to just a couple of soldiers, who I for the life of me cannot recall their names or faces, and SGT Horvath from Saving Private Ryan. They team up with a couple of other soldiers including a Russian and a sarcastic British soldier played by Vinnie Jones. 

From that point it becomes a bit of a copy of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. This rag tag group of different personalities on a mission to stop an absurd Nazi plot (in this case, the Nazis seem to have invented the atomic bomb). And there’s a vindictive Nazi officer looking to take them down. The tone also shifts wildly between a dreary serious “war is hell” piece and a tongue in cheek dark comedy. 

Character wise There’s really nobody that I can remember from the characters aside from SGT Horvath (since he was in another movie I liked and was likely cast because of it), Vinnie Jones (since he is hilarious) and the Russian guy (since he gets an epic fight scene set to German opera).  

All in all I didn’t hate it. But there are of course much better world war 2 movies that might be more true to the game’s tone, feel and spirit than this “adaptation”. Maybe check out those.