THE LAST DROP could have been a better WW II film had the writer and director decided on the focus. The directorial choices vary from very fine (mixing black and white grainy shots from war footage with stagy though competent settings in color) to questionable (allowing a musical score including steel guitar music and contemporary sounds to intrude into a time when such instrumentation was not even known) to mediocre (allowing the actors to be caricatures instead of players in a tense drama).
Essentially the story is set before Christmas with the dropping of troops via gliders into Holland to secure a secret mission involving looted Nazi treasure. The Germans are fast-driving to capture it and send it to Berlin before the Allies land. The British team is determined to maintain custody of the goods until war's end. And then of course there is a group of self-promoting Germans who simply want to capture the treasure for their own reward. Not a bad set of conflicts, but the film's problems are centered on some bad casting choices that prevent the momentum from being as relentlessly forward as good war films should. Some of the cast members look so much alike that it becomes difficult to determine just who is who: in one case this is intentional as the plot reveals in its ending, but in most cases it is a problem due to cramped dialects, stiff acting, and over the top parody. With the exception of Billy Zane and Michael Madsen there are no big names here and in many ways that is a good thing because the two stars are the weakest characters.
Though the plot outline has possibilities - what is war but greed under different names - the mixture of ribald humor and gut-wrenching realism fail to make the story work. Grady Harp
