Piece of Cake (1988)

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

I bought this DVD set, sight unseen, and wish I hadn't. The script needed some serious rewriting as it seems to be completely devoid of any feeling and pales in comparison to the book. The lighting is horrid, very unpolished, but if it was just that I could overlook it. The script doesn't focus enough on the characters...there is hardly an introduction to various characters making it a tad difficult to distinguish who is who(especially in the planes--no idea who dies when).I have long felt that the key to a good film is in getting the audience to care about the characters; if you don't have that you don't have anything. There was no focus on the characters at all--you never got to know them--who they were, what they liked..what made them do the things that they do. The series is 5 hours long and split up into 6 parts...I bet you are wondering what they did with all this time if they didn't detail the characters---they put a lot of filler in it....I will say at least an entire hour is spent watching them land and take off in their planes LOL (I mean do we really need to see that over and over again???). I would have given this a much higher rating had they just improved our knowledge of the characters.

"Piece is Cake" is defeatist, revisionist history of the worst kind, whose only point is to unfairly savage the reputation of the (admittedly fictional) pilots it portrays. It left a remarkably bad taste in my mouth.In the March 1989 "Aeroplane Monthly", Roland Beamont wrote a stinging condemnation of the way that RAF Fighter Command was portrayed in the TV mini-series. A few of his comments are worth repeating:"There was no sense of defeatism at any time in any of the squadrons that I saw in action, and a total absence of the loutishness portrayed in 'Piece of Cake'. It would not have been tolerated for a moment... ...The prevailing atmosphere was more akin to that in a good rugby club, though with more discipline. Nor was there any sense of 'death or glory'. RAF training had insisted that we were there to defend this country, and now we were required to do it - no more and no less."There was no discussion of 'bravery' or 'cowardice'. People either had guts or they did not - but mostly they did. But we knew fear, recognised it in ourselves and in each other, did our damnedness to control it, and then got on with the job..."...I could feel no 'glory', but there was a sense of greatness, and none of this bore the slightest resemblance to 'Piece of Cake'."Beamont was, in his own words, "a fighter pilot who, unlike the author and producer of the recent TV series, was there at the time". Beamont served with 87 Squadron both in France and the BoB, before going on to become one of the premier exponents of both the Typhoon and Tempest, and a post-war test pilot."Piece of Cake" is an absolute, total misrepresentation of the way pilots in Fighter Command acted at the time. It is nothing less than a complete and utter disgrace...

Watched on Masterpiece Theatre years ago. Outstanding show. If only I can remember the catchy tune that opened the show each week. A true adventure and tear jerker that everyone can enjoy. This is the kind of show that has made Masterpiece Theatre a staple of PBS.

Very good mini-series, but it falls a bit short of the excellent book by Derek Robinson. Air combat sequences are taken from the film "Battle of Britain". The acting is very good across the board, however, I'd like to see some more character development and lines for a few of the characters. See the film, but read the book as well. Also recommended are Derek Robinson's "Hornet's Sting", "Goshawk Squadron", and "A Good Clean Fight".