So much average

Highly Overrated But Still Good

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The World War I is finished and the chaos is ruling over Eastern Europe... In this film Sergiu Nicolaescu plays the role of Robin Hood style officer who tries to defend poor peasants in Transylvania terrorized by their master and the bunch of demobilized soldiers. It's obvious that this film was heavily influenced by classic Spaghetti Western films by Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci (Great Silence, as example), but here the director draws the picture of life in the Eastern Europe. Transylvanian landscapes are atmospheric, Nicolaescu is much more realistic in depiction of ordinary life comparing with Italian westerns (in the same time creating Transylvanian background of the story he uses dark Gothic elements). The images of soldiers in this film could remind you of heroes from novels by Erich Maria Remarque. It isn't great film but it's quite interesting. You could see some authentic ethnographic moments in it and the scene of duel of the officers using the grenades as their main weapon is very bright. If you like Great Silence by Sergio Corbucci - you would like this film (The Trap for Mercenaries) too.

Here, the story is still told almost well, and the direction is decent enough. One of the best scenes is the drinking roulette in the end, where the mercenaries are paired two by two, to drink themselves stupid, so that the oe keeping longer of each couple shoots the other. Of course, Amza Pella and Cornel Girbea offer the most interesting confrontation and outcome.But, all in all, the movie doesn't bring anything new. It's just an adventure film on historical background.I also remember that when I saw it people were commenting that the censorship had insisted to delete certain scenes, because they were too cruel, and Nicolaescu was able to keep them. For that period, it was interesting enough, but they can't compare with what one can see now as cruelty.

The most significant aspect of "The Mercenaries' Trap" consists in the fact that it's definitely the last movie where we can recognize something of the long gone adventure spirit of Sergiu Nicolaescu, once so nicely worked up in his cop movies from the years 1972-1974. After 1976, the popular movie-maker started to gradually lose his energy, resourcefulness and skills, and "Capcana mercenarilor" represents his last partially successful effort of becoming again what he had been in his youth years. The narrative is convincingly fast paced, the paranoid atmosphere in the castle is indeed claustrophobic and terrorizing, and the cruelty scenes, although extremely tame and delicate by any objective standards, seemed really shocking in those years when the communist censorship was forbidding any so-called "excesses" in Romanian cinema. Also, the movie can rightfully boast with some good performances by Gheorghe Cozorici, Amza Pellea, Cornel Gârbea, Mircea Albulescu, Constantin Rautchi and Klaus Gehrke. Acceptable for anyone longing for some old-fashioned style war cinema.

This movie have an excelent team of actors and a very good scenario based on realities of the years following WWI, in spite of the fact that it have a controversed subject, because of the nationalities depicted (romanian and hungarian). Anyhow I won't spoil the pleasure of seen this movie, but I tell to people who will watch that is a little bit violent, but that was the reality on that period of time. The genre is war/drama/adventure.