Overlord review – American soldiers take on supernatural Nazis in this deathly dull war thriller

• MaryAnn Johanson
• November 5, 2018

American soldiers take on supernatural Nazis in this deathly dull war thriller

Nazis with supernatural weapons? You'll wait a long while to find out what Overlord It's really about it, and it's absolutely nothing to do with it.

On the night before the D-Day invasion in June 1944, a small band of American soldiers (led by Jovan Adepo and Wyatt Russell) parachutes into enemy territory behind the Normandy beaches on a mission to take out a German radio tower jamming Allied transmissions. The insertion sequence, all the droning warplanes flying through enemy fire in the dark and then hellish jumps to the earth, is pretty thrilling.

But while most kind of movies get bigger as they go, Overlord it goes on. War movie snapshots abound, though there's not even any winking recognition of this; Some of the soldiers are difficult to tell apart, they're so indistinct. Nazi officer Wafner (Pilou Asbæk) sexually intimidating French villager and Token Girl Chloe (Mathilde Ollivier). It's incredibly lazy stuff.

Still, no one goes to a horror flick for incisor character development, right? And yet the movie faffs around for a solid hour before the action moves to the secret Nazi lab the Americans have discovered, where Bad Things are happening. There's no reason for Overlord to hold off so long revealing what it's really going to be, it's not knowing what to do with its secrets beyond engaging with them, rote gore and crane.

The flick may open with terrifying elegance, but by the end of the game.

General release from Weds 7 Nov.