Die Söldner-Falle

The most significant aspect of "The Mercenaries' Trap" consists in the fact that it's definitely the last movie where we can recognize something of the long gone adventure spirit of Sergiu Nicolaescu, once so nicely worked up in his cop movies from the years 1972-1974. After 1976, the popular movie-maker started to gradually lose his energy, resourcefulness and skills, and "Capcana mercenarilor" represents his last partially successful effort of becoming again what he had been in his youth years. The narrative is convincingly fast paced, the paranoid atmosphere in the castle is indeed claustrophobic and terrorizing, and the cruelty scenes, although extremely tame and delicate by any objective standards, seemed really shocking in those years when the communist censorship was forbidding any so-called "excesses" in Romanian cinema. Also, the movie can rightfully boast with some good performances by Gheorghe Cozorici, Amza Pellea, Cornel Gârbea, Mircea Albulescu, Constantin Rautchi and Klaus Gehrke. Acceptable for anyone longing for some old-fashioned style war cinema.