Redwarmin This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

Brenda The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

Robert J. Maxwell Something of a proxy for the Vietnam War, it's the story of a handful of British soldiers and one reluctant American translator trekking through the bush on a Japanese-held island with the mission of destroying a Japanese radio station.The director, Robert Aldrich, is a Hollywood craftsman but adds little to a kind of paradoxical tale. Some of the men are killed -- by rifle bullet, by throat-cutting, by land mine -- and within minutes the others are laughing at land crabs or having petty fist fights about who owns a pack of Woodbine Cigarettes. They sneak through the enemy's jungle shouting, singing, and joking with one another. The gun shots don't sound like rifles at all. Your disbelief must not only be suspended. It must be hung by the neck until it is dead.The cast is fine, though, full of British character actors whose faces, if not names, will be familiar to many American viewers. Harry Andrews, of whom we don't see much, is unimpeachable as the colonel who plans the mission. Ian Bannen is always reliable and brings something personal to every role. He has the best lines in the script, if in fact they were in the script. His mates are schlepping a wounded Bannen across a muddy stream and he warns them in a Scots accent, "Watch out for those man-eating trout." When someone suggests leaving Bannon behind, he shouts out, "Listen to me, you bloody Glaswegian queer! That blood is worth bottling!" Denholm Elliott (later to die of AIDS) projects the personality and fixed expression of a frightened and neurotic worry-wort but proves to be pretty cold blooded. The young Michael Caine, as the medical orderly, has a winning smile. And Cliff Robertson, as the seconded American Japanese translator, doesn't damage the proceedings. His switch from slacker to determined leader takes ten seconds.The problem is that it's an ensemble movie and none of these fine actors has a chance to do very much. They die, one by one, with little drama and no visible remorse on the part of the remaining group. And the script is so self-contradictory that it virtually undoes the entire film. When Aldrich gets hold of a halfway decent script -- "The Dirty Dozen" or "Flight of the Phoenix" -- he handles it very well but he seems to have been reckless and put no effort into this rather ordinary war movie.Suspense in a movie like this is inevitable and it increases after the radio station is destroyed and what's left of the team tries to get back to the British base, with the enemy in hot pursuit. The Japanese are not treated as fools or as evil monsters. Ken Takakura, in his brief appearance as a major intent on capturing the patrol, is handsome and reasonable.Overall, this looks like what it is, a colorful Hollywoodish production. The score should have been written by Malcolm Arnold and conducted by Muir Mathieson. And I can't help wondering how David Lean would have handled the whole affair.

inspectors71 If you like your war movies heavy on meaning and light on logic, there's Robert Aldrich's 1970 Too Late the Hero, a clunking mess of an "anti-Vietnam War" WWII-era film that gets bogged down right from the start with Aldrich pointing out the moral-equivalency of the Allies and the Imperial Japanese by falling into that hoary 60s cliché of making the fascists brilliant and their opponents (us) foolish and sadistic cowards.Shot in the Phillipines, TLTH is such an stupidly plotted and incompetently constructed pile of junk that it makes the war movie by Cornel Wilde (Beach Red, I think) look good in comparison.I taped Too Late the Hero off TCM a couple years ago, sat down to see if it was anywhere near the quality of The Dirty Dozen, and almost immediately realized that Aldrich's slow decline (with the exception of The Longest Yard) had begun.Skip it, unless you find watching an artist's career implode an entertainment in itself.

Claudio Carvalho In the spring of 1942, in Southwest Pacific, Captain John G. Nolan (Henry Fonda) postpones the leave of the volunteer Lieutenant Sam Lawson (Cliff Robertson) and gives an assignment in New Hebrides Island with the British troops based on the required profile – fluency in Japanese and good shape. When Lt. Lawson arrives in the base, the commander explains that the island is divided in the British and Japanese sectors and he should go with a group of soldiers behind the Japanese lines to destroy their radio and transmit a false message to the Japanese forces. Captain Hornsby (Denholm Elliott) is assigned to lead the group, but during the tense mission, he has friction with Private Tosh Hearne (Michael Caine). When things go wrong, the soldiers have to fight to survive while exposing their weakness in character."Too Late the Hero" is a realistic and original war movie with human and cynical characters in the jungle of an island in Pacific. Michael Caine plays a rude and insubordinate cockney soldier that is only interested in surviving. Most of the soldiers are cowards that fight only to save their lives and not for patriotism or idealism. The hero of the title is actually an anti-hero that redeems himself in the end. The dialogs are cynical and Tosh has the best lines, like for example, when he proposes to Lawson to go North; or when he talks about the hole where he lives in his hometown in a total lack of perspective. My only remark is the long running time that could be a little shorter. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Assim Nascem os Heróis" ("This Way the Heroes Are Born")

Spikeopath Too Late the Hero is directed by Robert Aldrich who also co-writes the screenplay with Lukas Heller and Robert Sherman. It stars Michael Caine, Cliff Robertson, Henry Fonda, Ken Takakura, Denholm Elliott, Lance Percival, Ronald Fraser and Ian Bannen. Music is by Gerald Fried and cinematography by Joseph F. Biroc.Lawson (Cliff Robertson) is an American naval officer who specialises in Asiatic languages, thus he is sent to a Pacific island to assist a group of British soldiers on what seems a routine mission. The mission is to simply knock out the Japanese army's key transmitter, but as the men get deeper into the jungle terrain it becomes obvious that the odds of survival are minimal at best. With inner fighting escalating and a hostile enemy closing in fast, it's a time for heroes to be born and friendships to be laid bare.Often, and wrongly, considered a weak attempt by Aldrich to cash in on the success of his Dirty Dozen movie three years earlier, Too Late the Hero had been written some ten year previously. Although some way away from the gutsy grandeur and bulging biceps of The Dirty Dozen, TLTH is still a potent war movie. Often claustrophobic in mood and acerbic in war character observations, film holds narrative attention from first reel to last. Bursts of violence drift in and out of the plot to keep things on the boil, but it's the excellently drawn characterisations of the major players that stops this from merely being another run of the mill "insanity of war" movie. It's also nice to find the Japanese are portrayed as an intelligent foe, and not the irksome machine gun fodder so rife in other films of the ilk. It helps to have Takakura turning in a stoic performance as part of the latter, too.Some other astute reviewers has given this film a tag line of it being a unique war film, not a truer line has been typed on the internet forums. This film, tho not bringing anything new by way of the psychological aspects of men under duress, always remains a thoroughly engrossing picture. Helmed by the criminally undervalued Aldrich, film boasts a ream of excellent performers making it unique by bringing to life a screenplay that's not pandering to any conformity's of the genre, it relies totally on strength of dialogue and character formations to capture our interest. Really the only charge from dissenters that might stick here is that it's arguably just another Vietnam allegory that the 70s seemed intent on giving us. Arguably, mind.It's a bloody suicide mission!That the cast list contains Michael Caine (brilliant here with gritty swagger), Cliff Robertson, Denholm Elliott and a barely used Henry Fonda is of obvious interest from the start, but the ace card in Too Late The Hero's pack is with its supporting players, Ian Bannen, Harry Andrews, Ronald Fraser and a serious turn from comedy specialist, Lance Percival, where all of them in the sweltering confines of the Phillipines location manage to pull the viewer into the mix and fully realise the crispness of Aldrich's excellent screenplay; aided superbly by Biroc who manages to convey via his photography some apt sweaty jungle madness. Yes! This is not a film for those wanting guns a blazing at every turn, it's simply not that type of Gung-Ho picture, those bursts of action, while hitting hard, are swamped by the focused action of the human mind at work, the kind where greed, mistrust and a basic survival instinct are the order of the day.The set-up of the two opposing armies on this island is a bit daft, so some suspension of logic is needed from the off, while there's no escaping the fact that there are a number of war movie clichés within. Yet this is still potent stuff, a film with things to say and corrosive in its telling. Making for once, the negativity of such material, still a rewarding viewing experience. 8/10