Parents' Guide to Wolves of War

This wartime movie never really recovers from an undercooked premise. Wolves of War finds a small group of soldiers dispatched behind enemy lines to retrieve an American professor -- apparently long-since settled in Germany -- before a scheduled air strike by their own compatriots. The plot allows for some agile action scenes on a budget, but not much more than that. Ed Westwick's celebrated, but sensitive, Jack Wallace is essentially the leader of a small band of Allied forces. His character gives license for more than one heart-to-heart scene about the toll fighting takes on the soldiers' personal lives. This quickly becomes repetitive, perhaps because the man they've been sent to retrieve -- Rupert Graves' Professor Hopper -- is barely there, both in terms of screen time and an adequate explanation of why he's so important.

In keeping with the total lack of character depth, it's left to some scenery chomping German soldiers to play the bad guys, wasting innocent civilians in-between tracking our band of covert soldiers through the forest. What could've been a neat, claustrophobic examination of the scientists who powered World War II and what happened to their technology is shrunk down to a clunky action flick.