This is a stacked cast you would be better off watching in literally any other movie.
The Wild Geese is essentially a 60s movie that just happened to have been made in the late 70s, plainly evident with its glacial pacing and ridiculously out-of-date politics, and possibly due to an older target audience at the time of release; given the age of the actors, it wouldn’t be entirely out of the question. Throughout its runtime, the film coasts through its mediocre narrative, believing itself to be moving along swimmingly, while it’s really drowning in deliberate, serious war talk and British exceptionalism; a combination that doesn’t bode well even in modern war thrillers.
Thankfully, it supplements this with a dose of uncompassionate hostility against black Africans, just to, you know, excite the old white people in the audience. Somehow, blatant and unsympathetic displays of a British infantry’s horrifying murders are hallowed acts of heroism, but when African troops execute them in an equally vicious manner, it’s savagery. The exploitation of apartheid in order to create this sportive British adventure is sickening in a modern context, and was clearly so at the time of release; frankly, every protest was seemingly very warranted.
The political text that is present is wholly unnuanced and far too easy; we see a South African apartheid supporter instantly change his bigoted beliefs with just a couple of (true, but) mediocre political speeches, of which the most transparent aspect is his shift from using the slur ‘kaffir’ to ‘bloke’. We just solved racism, guys!
But don’t let that discourage you from seeing it; aided by the elements mentioned above, the movie is very funny. Not on purpose, of course, but ironically? Absolute gold. The hilarious lack of political correctness (that is a huge understatement, for sure) is pretty amazing to watch as a time capsule, and it’s aided by some pretty incompetent cinematography, dialogue that can easily be made fun of when watching with others, and a score that sounds as if it’s meant to be apart of a classic Disney movie. When the cargo plane soars over Africa, shitting out an endless number of ragdolling troops, the whimsy brought on by the cute string orchestration is strikingly unfitting; one cannot contain their laughter. If it can’t be enjoyed as a war drama, it can surely be enjoyed as a comedy, and thank goodness for it, too; the morbid, racist nihilism would be far too depressing otherwise.
