Too much of everything

One of my all time favorites.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

I read someone comment if you had read the book you'd know there is a lot of truth to this. If you'd read the book you'd know this film is very loosely based on a book and then played with to give it an American interest. Apparently Bushell was caught after being betrayed by a Frenchman. No he wasn't, the depiction in the original film is how he was caught. Apparently an American made a "home run" No he didn't. By the time the escape took place the Americans had been put in a separate camp and none went out. Apparently a former American cop lead the investigation. No he didn't, it just goes on making it look like the Americans were the heroes and in this case, they weren't. They even make Winston Churchill look like a three foot tall midget. Bad casting at it's most obvious. The acting was pretty bad, and Charles Haid's accent was abysmal. I liked him in Hill St Blues but what was that accent all about? As for the romance angle, that was purely laughable. Had this been portrayed as an escape story it could have been passable but to pretend it is the true story of what happened next, or even insinuate it, is frankly an insult to those who really took part. If it's just a mooovie, then don't try to pretend that it's telling us something that really happened like this.The story of The Great Escape and the subsequent events is incredible enough without having to make things or change events. In fact this film waters down some of the events like the officers that were captured and taken to a concentration camp and escaped from there by tunneling out. Watch it for entertainment, but don't expect to learn any sort of accurate facts from it.

The issue with this "true story" is that it was a made for America TV film, as a follow up to a cinema film that had already been twisted to add an American interest. By the time you get to the stage of this film it's very difficult to make for an audience who will have very little connection to the real story - i.e. that 76 predominantly European or Commonwealth service men escaped from a PoW camp, 73 were re-captured and under direct orders from Hitler 50 were executed in ones and twos by SS and Gestapo henchmen.The film itself, if it didn't have the silly "untold story" tag, would be passable TV fare. The investigation, the depiction of the nature of the murders (i.e. individuals rather than the 50 in a field as per the original) are realistic whilst not necessarily being true. The fact it plays loose with who did the investigating and what actually happened is only an issue if you are looking for the true story.If you're looking for a film about war crimes and investigating them, then as TV movies go this is OK. If you're looking for the real "untold story" then don't believe everything you see in this production.

Many of the names, such as Reeve's John Dodge and MacShane's Roger Bushnell were actual characters. (And yes, Dodge *was* related to Churchill!) If you've read the book, then you know there is a great deal of fact in this telefilm.True, there's no romance in the novel, but as Hitchcock said, "It's only a mo-vie." And instead of the master assassin being killed, he was taken to trial. But overall, if you manage to see this in its entirety, you should enjoy it. (Well, you know what I mean.What makes this even more interesting is the presence of Donald Pleasance, one of the stars of the 1963. Plus, Jud Taylor, who directed Part 2, was also in the film.

I only saw this silly made-for-TV sequel in it's chopped-down 93-minute video version, and it was quite obvious that there were many things missing. On the plus side, I didn't care.Where THE GREAT ESCAPE was a somewhat-fictionalized version of a true story, GE2 is a fictional story which only touches reality at odd points (and sometimes the oddest: the part about recognizing some Gestapo officers from a painting in a nightclub is true).The real story of the investigation of the Stalag Luft III murders would probably have been a lot more interesting, but there might not have been a part in that for Christopher Reeve.