American director Phil Blattenberger will get props right here for stretching his price range clingfilm-thin to mount a good revival of a bygone style: the you’ve-only-gone-and-blown-the-bloody-doors-off wartime 1960/70s action-adventure. Nicely, to be exact, the post-wartime action-adventure, with some sweeping pampas vistas and strategically deployed title casting – together with a fleeting glimpse of previous warhorse Michael Ironside – pepping up a South American Nazi hunt.
“They are saying the person who seeks revenge ought to dig two graves,” is the recommendation proffered to one-time allied sniper Will Spalding (Jacob Keohane). He’s in Argentina to atone for failing to guard his B17 crewmates when they’re downed close to enemy strains. Torturing and assassinating his manner down a listing of German expats, he’s looking for Colonel Martin Bach (The Mummy’s Arnold Vosloo), who executed his comrades in chilly blood. An opportunity encounter in a bar with atomic physicist Albert Vogel (Al Pagano) factors to the place Bach is mendacity low, however the Mossad operative Leyna Rahn (Corinne Britti) is itching to liquidate the scientist earlier than he can help Spalding.
With Bach performing as safety chief to a sure A-list goosestepper imagined right here to have survived the warfare, Blattenberger decides to trip the Tarantinoesque alt-history excessive highway. Generally this inspiration turns into too obvious, particularly in Jackson Rathbone’s genially menacing Nazi barfly – harking back to Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa – and a digression on eugenics that echoes the cranium scene in Django Unchained. However regardless of this, in addition to a free hand on the plotting rudder and often-shaky path, Blattenberger’s energetic screenplay, with its apparent love for the style, permits him to outrun these issues.
Keohane is unremittingly dour within the lead and – till offered with a last-minute satan’s cut price that weighs up the which means of heroism – not likely referred to as on to leaven it with introspection. However Pagano lives it up with an urbane playfulness because the scientist of unsure allegiances, and Vosloo has an imposing darkish integrity because the unapologetic get together man. Regardless of the uneven execution, Condor’s Nest has simply sufficient chew.
