Just like Italy in 1943, who was a former German ally, Hungary in 1944 was also occupied by the Nazis.It was then that most of the Jews were deported to Auschwitz and many Hungarian non Jews were sent to so called work camps.One of them was a famous Hungarian soccer player, who was given the task by the Germans to round up the best players from the camps and play in a match against the Nazi team.This was supposed to be for Hitler's birthday that year.Despite enormous pressure and promises to get released if they lost, the inmates tried their best to win.Andrey Dojkic who portrayed the inmate team's captain Laszlo Horvath gave a bravura performance.
There's a scene where the German Colonel's collar tab, denoting he is a Heer Combat Engineer Officer, wasn't stitched on properly and it took me right out of the film.It was about twenty years ago that I read an article about what has become known as 'the death match' in some men's magazine; a football game between FC Start, a team of forced Ukrainian labourers made up of former players of clubs Dynamo Kiev and Lokomotive, and the team of the German Air Force ‘Flakelf’, to commemorate Hitler's birthday. The result was a 5-3 victory for the Ukrainian workers of the ‘3rd bakery unit’ - a result that the Nazis could not let go unpunished.Back then, I had never heard of the death match, but I was more than familiar with the film this true story inspired; 1981's Escape to Victory, a rousing, somewhat silly but nonetheless enjoyable Boy's Own comic strip brought to life for the big screen featuring a cavalcade of stars from cinema and the football pitch including Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone, Max Von Sydow, Pele and Bobby Moore. Like I say, that film is fun, but the real story is arguably more important and its ramifications more sobering. It's a story that needs to be told, and indeed has previously been told in Zoltán Fábri's 1961 movie Két félidő a pokolban (aka Two Half-Times in Hell). But now we have The Match, a Croatian-US co-production from father and son filmmakers Jakov and Dominik Sedlar, a movie inspired by the true life tale.The film's biggest stars internationally are Franco Nero and Armand Assante. The latter has a very small role, like five minutes tops, as a Nazi POW camp commandant, whilst the former inhabits the narrative device that hangs the film together in the role of a grandfather relating the story to his footballing grandson in the present day. Danish actor Caspar Phillipson (who has previously played JFK in both Jackie and Blonde) is the Nazi with the flapping collar tab and whose idea it is to mount a match between POWs and Nazis to honour Hitler's birthday, whilst Andrej Dojkic gets the main role (though not top billing) as the prisoners' team captain and former Hungarian pro, Laszlo Horvath. As with Escape to Victory, there are cameos from real footballers - Croatian internationals Dejan Lovren and Mateo Kovacic (now at Chelsea) and Australia's Mark Viduka - presumably to make the action look authentic...if only someone will have told the directors this, as it's the usual slo-mo, close ups and blurry footage we always seem to get in most football films.Unfortunately the true, fascinating and tragic story of 'the death match' has once again not been done with the justice it deserves. The Match is well intentioned, but is overall a very flat and uninvolving, cheaply made affair, and the device to bridge the film with Nero in the present just doesn't work, forever pulling us out of the drama and feeling exposition heavy - though that being said there are moments where the screenplay chooses to plant exposition that would work here into the main action instead, so we get a weird scene in which a POW explains to fellow POW Laszlo about Nazis rounding up people like them and putting them into work camps. Surely it would have made more sense to have the kid ask Grandpa Nero why these characters were imprisoned?
