The Last Drop (2006) starring Laurence Fox, Louis Dempsey, Lucy Gaskell, Coral Beed , Andrew Howard, Jack Dee directed by Colin Teague Movie Review

The Last Drop (2006)   2/52/52/52/52/5


Billy Zane in The Last Drop (2006)

The Lost Plot

A group of British soldiers under the codename "Matchbox" are part of the much bigger operation Market Garden except things go wrong and they end upcoming down miles away from where they should with many of the men killed when they came under the fire. The handful who survive try to continue with their mission which all they know is to rendezvous with two Dutch resistance fighters. What they are not aware of is that their mission is to steal valuable works of art before the Nazi's get their hands on them. Meanwhile a trio of renegade German's are after the works of art for their own personal reasons. But on top of this there are Americans in the area stomping around like they own the place.

"The Last Drop" is a modern attempt to make "Kelly's Heroes" or at least to make a movie with a similar idea where we have these people after valuable goods and plenty of "humorous" banter and "humorous" characters. Unfortunately it doesn't quite come off partly because it is far too obvious and embarrassing when it comes to the humour and secondly because it gives us far too many characters to deal with. It is a simple rule but for a movie to work we need to get to know a few characters early on so that we can follow them but "The Last Drop" ignores that rule and so whilst we may recognize some famous faces the characters end up meaning nothing to us.

The knock on effect of this is that the humour ends up incredibly forced from a radio message where a tow plane says "matchbox you are too hot to handle" to a shouting corporal screaming Ives as it every war movie needs an Ives. Don't get me wrong as the intentions are good and in truth I liked the idea even if was unoriginal but the forced nature of the jokes just left me bemused by how it could go wrong. And trust me where as "Kelly's Heroes" had quirky characters who were amusing all that "The Last Drop" has are actors putting on accents and doing their own thing.

In the end "The Last Drop" ends up incredibly hit n miss where you suddenly recognize one of the actors be it Michael Madsen, Rafe Spall, Billy Zane and even Jack Dee and wait for it, ex footballer David Ginola. But the only thing you are likely to remember their performances for are when they go wrong rather than right which is more often than not.

What this all boils down to is "The Last Drop" was a good idea but one which didn't come off. Whether the scope of the story with so many characters was too ambitious or writer and director Colin Teague didn't have the time and budget to do it justice I don't know but the end result is a movie where you do two things; recognize the actors and wait for the next forced moment of humour to fall flat.


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