Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Murder Company’ on Paramount+, A WWII Movie With Kelsey Grammer As The Draw

In Murder Company, now streaming on Paramount+, Kelsey Grammer plays a general with the 82nd Airborne who sends five soldiers to do the work of an entire company. It’s a few days before Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy, and coming up with a reason to send only a few men on a top secret mission behind the German lines allows Murder Company to fit the usual rhythms and firefights of a grand-scale war movie into its tight video-on-demand budget and even tighter shooting schedule. So is it mission accomplished? Or does Murder Company get taken out by friendly fire? Well, at least Grammer looks appropriately stern with his Eisenhower jacket and a chomped-on cigar.  

MURDER COMPANY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: General Haskel (Grammer) isn’t going to lead from the front. Not in Murder Company – no, he’s going to spend most of the film in a field encampment’s tent, or perhaps in a captured country house, where he’ll periodically receive reports from the same underling, put on a grim Kelsey Grammer face, and grumble things like “The German 91st is in the next town – they want our bridge, and we’re not giving it back.” 

Don’t get too excited about Haskel’s defense of that bridge. The few scenes that Grammar has here are spread throughout a film that spends the majority of its time with 82nd Airborne soldiers Southern (William Mosely), Coolidge (Pooch Hall), Smith (Joe Anderson), Stubbs (Jilon Vanover), and Miller (Ian Niles), as Haskel sends them out into the occupied territory around Normandy – it’s Bulgaria, but we’ll allow it – to liberate French resistance fighter Jean Daquin (Gilles Marini) and locate an SS officer named Ramsey (Roman Schomburg), who Allied brass has targeted for “liquidation” ahead of the D-Day. Liquidation, as in assassination, as in how this “Murder Company” gets its nickname.

They won’t all make it to the target. Along the way there will be pick-up battles with random roaming German patrols, chatter about the “lousy krauts” they’re fighting and their “dames” back home, and even a bit of character development, as Coolidge rises above systemic racism in the US Army and Southern gets a crash course in being a leader of men. As Haskel continues to receive reports on their progress, and Ramsey is revealed to be a caricature of wartime sadism – he even has an evil facial scar! – the boys in Murder Company will have to come together, watch each other’s backs, and maybe learn a thing or two about Americans fighting a war on French soil.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Remove the set piece battle sequences from Saving Private Ryan, and retain its softer middle – a small group of American soldiers traipsing through the countryside in search of their objective – and you have the bulk of Murder Company. In that sense, it can also play like an episode of television in the Band of Brothers universe.

At the same time, and though neither take place during the Second World War, Land of Bad  – with Russell Crowe in the Kelsey Grammer anchor-type role – and the Jamie Dornan-starring The Siege of Jadotville are two examples of war movies that effectively work within their limited scale and budget.

Performance Worth Watching: Pooch Hall fares the best of the Murder Company crew. As Coolidge, Hall quickly establishes his character’s gift of gab – he’s believable in a naturalistic way that overtakes his fellow soldiers.  

Memorable Dialogue: “They’ve got a new mission for us. There’s some Frenchman that Allied intelligence has been keeping tabs on; part of the Maquis. That’s the French resistance, Miller – try and keep up.” If you watch Murder Company, you will not be like young Private Miller, because the film drops in globs of easy-to-swallow exposition like this all over the place.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: They can’t all be giant war epics. Murder Company does what it can in the VOD space, with Kelsey Grammer’s mug looking appropriately generalistic in his officer’s waistcoat and steel pot – perfect for filling up the little square on a streamer’s offerings menu. It tosses its little crew of paratroopers into an appropriate amount of firefights – the crux of any war movie, after all – and features them blasting away on full-auto with replicas of period weapons. (Muzzle flash and blood spatter, added for VFX effect.) Those skirmishes don’t really connect to where the movie places itself, though, since we hear a lot about the Normandy landings and major German troop movements, but only ever seem to see a few Wehrmacht soldiers at a time. And while Grammer looks and sounds the part, he’s really only here to grandstand in a few key scenes, leaving the rest of the film to periodically labor through a few minutes of strained dialogue before it sets up its next random gunfight.

Our Call: With satisfactory, yet underwhelming VOD battle action, standard-issue writing, and a role for Kelsey Grammer that isn’t exactly a cameo but isn’t very substantial either, you can take this order under advisement: Murder Company is a SKIP IT.   

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.