40
Exceedingly well-shot (by Jack Cardiff) action film that will evaporate from the memory shortly after the end credits roll.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
50
he Dogs of War doesn't begin to deal with the moral complexity it promises: it keeps settling for easy, melodramatic solutions. Irvin is obviously a gifted storyteller, but he's shackled with the wrong story: it's a shame he couldn't have scrapped more of Forsyth's original plot and made a real movie about mercenaries and the Third World. [23 Feb 1981, p.61]
50
Washington Post by Gary Arnold
The Dogs of War can be recommended only as a desperate snack for rabid tastes.
70
The New Yorker by Pauline Kael
A crisp, tough-minded action film about an international group of mercenaries who stage a coup in a small, decaying West African country run by an Idi Amin-Papa Doc-style despot. The casting of Christopher Walken as Shannon, the leader of the group, gives the film the fuse it needs.
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Rick Groen
Dogs of War takes its title from Julius Caesar but its cue from Julia Child. Based on Frederick Forsyth's novel, the film is meant to be an intimate study of soldiers of fortune. But it ends only as a shallow, pseudo-elliptical lesson in how to whip up a frothy coup when time is pressing and the guests are about to arrive. [17 Feb 1981]
80
The New York Times by Vincent Canby
It demonstrates the kind of intelligence and thought one doesn't often find in a movie aimed at the action-adventure crowd. This is evident as much in what the film doesn't do and say as in what is actually seen on the screen.