102 min | R | June 26, 2026 | Roadside Attractions / Saban Films
TLDR: A lean Battle of the Bulge survival thriller that keeps reaching for Saving Private Ryan and keeps coming up short. Real moments of tension, but never the scale or the authenticity to sell them.
Rod Lurie strips the war movie down to one man behind enemy lines with a radio and his instincts. Scott Eastwood plays Castle, a wounded soldier trying to claw his way back to his unit through the snow while the Germans close in. Lurie has made good movies about men under pressure. This one has the bones for it. What it does not have is the budget or the vision to match its ambitions.
Eastwood is acceptable. He carries the picture on his shoulders and there are stretches where he is genuinely good, quiet scenes where the fear and exhaustion read on his face without a word of dialogue. Then the movie hands him something to say and the spell breaks. He is not the problem. The writing is.
The whole thing plays like a film desperate to be Saving Private Ryan without any of the resources that made Saving Private Ryan work. The scale is small. The production is small. The scene-setting is small. Lurie stages a few tense sequences that land, and there are moments of real craft buried in here, but the movie never opens up. It stays claustrophobic in the wrong way, hemmed in by what it clearly could not afford to show.
The dialogue is the tell. This is a story set more than eighty years ago and the words never sound like it. The period detail that should ground you in 1944 is missing, and modern quips keep slipping in, probably without anyone noticing. That kind of thing pulls you out every time. A war film lives or dies on whether you believe the world, and this one keeps reminding you it was made in 2026.
There is a solid ninety-minute thriller trying to get out here, and Lurie almost finds it. Almost is the whole review. Worth a watch if you like the genre and can forgive the seams. Just do not expect it to earn the comparison it so obviously wants.