Mark Reviews Movies: WOLF HOUND

Wolf Hound, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 2, 2022

The extended opening sequence of Wolf Hound, which revolves around an attempted bombing run in Nazi-occupied France, looks pretty authentic, and considering the obvious shortcuts regarding budget that the filmmakers have to take later, one does wonder just how authentic it and a climactic sequence actually are. The answer arrives during the end credits, when we learn that director Michael B. Chait enlisted the use of real World War II-era aircraft for the movie. Apart from the shooting and the explosions, then, we're watching the real deal.

That authenticity pays off quite a bit during the initial sequence, which otherwise is heavy with expository dialogue and introducing us to thin, generic characters—some of whom won't even survive this mission. There's an awkwardness to Timothy Ritchey's screenplay that, at least near the start, we can almost forgive, simply because Chait and the aerial crews—both operating the planes and capturing that footage—offer just enough spectacle to keep us distracted from the material in between the aircraft work. Once the story is taken out of the sky, though, the clunky screenplay seems to infect every other element of the movie.

The opening scene has a B-17 bomber and its fighter escorts searching for a hidden Nazi base somewhere in the forest. The trio of planes is ambushed by a pair of German pilots, who are flying RAF fighters as Trojan horses.

In the aftermath of the dogfight, the only survivors are fighter pilot Capt. David Holden (James Maslow) and assorted members of the bomber's crew (The most definitive characterization of any of them is that one is Jewish, one is from Brooklyn and makes a point of repeatedly making that known, and another is especially muscular—not much but broad and stereotypical characterization, in other words). While the bomber makes an emergency landing at the German base it was meant to destroy, Holden is lost among the trees of the surrounding forest, being hunted by a Nazi patrol and Luftwaffe Maj. Eric Roth (Trevor Donovan), who killed Holden's wingman and whose brother—his own flying partner in the ambush—was killed by the American pilot.

At the base, the dastardly Col. Krieger (John Turk) wants to repair the American bomber and load it with a new super-weapon: a single bomb that could level an entire city. That means it's up to Holden and the bomber's crew, who are now prisoners with a ragtag group of others, to put a stop to the villainous colonel's plan.

For whatever reason, the filmmaking skill Chait displays in the opening sequence and even during the aerial climax disappears when this story is grounded. To be fair, Ritchey's screenplay doesn't offer much more than a series of chases and shootouts, along with some posturing debates between action scenes. In those action setpieces, though, Chait barely has a handle on the basics.

Essentially, Holden decides to find the base to rescue his comrades and, after discovering a convenient notebook with an abundance of documents, try to stop a plan to attack London. In the process, he has to evade Roth, seeking revenge for the death of his brother, and a team led by Capt. Werner (Michael Wayne Foster, whose thick, V-for-W German dialect is the most egregious of some bad ones here). Chait uses slow-motion quite a bit, as characters run, ammunition is checked and loaded, and pistol chambers recoil. While that effect is cheaply predictable, the most significant issue with the action sequences is that their comprehension of staging is absent.

One ambush has Holden taking on an entire squad of Nazis—and taking out most of them—by running a circle around them, hiding, and taking potshots at German soldiers who rush one at a time toward him. The movie's big setpiece is a lengthy shootout in a hangar and on the runway of the Nazi base. Chait simply appears to shoot some characters firing assorted guns in a given direction, before cutting to random extras being hit, sparks flying off the same barrel, or an explosion—regardless of whether or not the basic angles between those shots lines up in any way. Within the chaos, some unintentionally amusing moments include a character suddenly realizing those barrels explode (after about a dozen of them do), one villain's downfall to some improperly stacked containers, and a truck's worth of Nazis standing and waiting to be shot by a character standing about two feet away.

It's a long stretch of empty formula and blatant incompetence. When Wolf Hound again takes to the air for a final series of showdowns, one wonders why it ever left the skies.

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