The Wrecking Crew (1968)

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

In truth, any opportunity to see the film on the big screen is welcome.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

A train carrying $1 billion in gold is hijacked in Denmark and secret agent "Matt Helm" (Dean Martin) has only 48 hours upon his arrival there before British and American markets collapse. The person the secret organization I.C.E. believes is responsible is the multi-millionaire "Count Contini" (Nigel Green). Assisting him is his beautiful but deadly fiancé, "Linka Karensky" (Elke Sommer) and his top agent from Hong Kong, "Yu-Rang" (Nancy Kwan). As luck would have it, Count Contini has recently dumped his mistress, "Lola Medina" (Tina Louise) and she is willing to make a deal. So with only the help of an assistant named "Freya Carlson" (Sharon Tate) waiting for him in Denmark, Matt Helm flies to Copenhagen to retrieve the gold. At any rate, rather than reveal what happens next I will just say that this movie is loaded with sexy women who all want to get close to Matt for one reason or another. In that regard, I thought both Elke Sommer and Nancy Kwan performed very well in their respective roles. Dean Martin was solid and Tina Louise looked great. But her role was a bit too short in my view. Sharon Tate also put on a good performance but her character was too inconsistent. One minute she's a dull-looking klutz and the next she's a sexy secret agent. Likewise, except for the fight between Yu-Rang and Freya, the combat scenes were quite boring. In short, this film is much like the other 3 Matt Helm movies with some really nice-looking actresses thrown in for good measure. It definitely has some flaws but all things considered it's still watchable all the same.

The movie is fantastic in its execution, not its substance, but it was never intended to be serious. The movie has all the glamor, and opulence that only American movies seems to be able to deliver. The choice of color, the character, and of course the girls.Dean Martin's Matt Helm was a product of the swinging '60s, and it's a beautiful movie in its own way. I wish that the modern movies had more of this kind of opulence to its style. Why not live a little like the way these people did ?It's intentionally silly, but if you take away the silly it still has the glamor like nothing you see these days. The movie is worth seeing for this alone.Elke Sommer, and Sharon Tate were beautiful, and we don't see beauties like this anymore either.

Though I know this was the last of the Dean Martin/Matt Helm pictures, it's the very first one I've seen just now on YouTube. I have to admit right up front that while the beginning with the premise just being explained was pretty exciting, I thought much of the rest of the action and fighting were lacking but then that may have been because the sound and dialogue synchronization was ahead of the actual picture by a few seconds on the upload. Still, it wasn't too bad what was depicted and with gorgeous women like Tina Louise, Nancy Kwan, Elke Sommer, and especially Sharon Tate as a redhead, how can this film fail in my eyes? Yes, Dino seemed a little mature when sharing scenes with some of them but he sure seemed to having sooo much fun and that's infectious! And that score by Hugo Montenegro sure was groovy fun! This picture sure made the swinging sixties seem like such fun, that's for sure! Okay, I think I've said enough so on that note, The Wrecking Crew is very much worth a look.

As I have said in the past, the Matt Helm series was one of the better series of spy spoofs in the history of filmdom. Unfortunately, this, the last entry in the series, does not live up to the fun of the other films. This was not a good film. The big mistake was that it seems overcrowded with various characters, especially Nancy Kwan, who should have been in a separate movie as an adversary for Helm. Sharon Tate is fairly good in this film, but she isn't as interesting as the other ladies who Dean Martin played off of in the previous films. At least Ann-Margaret played a somewhat flighty girl who was smarter than she appeared in the second film and Janice Rule was more or less an equal to Helm in the third film. Also, wasn't she supposed to be playing a British agent in this film? Someone should have stepped in and told her to start using a British accent. She pretty much sounded like she always did. This definitely ended the series on a bad note.