Tom Selleck is here cast as a gentleman thief blackmailed in 1939 by the FBI and Bob Hoskins into stealing a fortune in looted diamonds from the Nazis. Tom, in a black cat burglar outfit and with his blow-dried moustache, does a fair impersonation of the Milk Tray man, but the movie splits into two unreconciled halves.
First, there’s the Boys’ Own adventure with cheery cockneys and lovable crooks and plenty of hairsbreadth escapes, but overlaid is some video Nazi exploitationer about the perverse pleasures of the horrible hun, represented by Lauren Hutton as a semi inclined she-wolf of the SS (“I like men with scars”) and Warren Clarke as an Erich von Stroheim knock-off bull-necked thug. Hutton affords some entertainment, but otherwise this mid-Atlantic production is best summed up by its view of the British climate as stereotypically dull and wet.