Of all the war films of the last fifty years, Escape To Victory is one of the more unusual. Set in a prisoner-of-war camp in France during the Second World War, the plot revolves around the exploits of a soccer team of captured Allied soldiers who are forced into playing an exhibition match against a team representing Nazi Germany for propaganda purposes. British officer Captain Colby refuses to allow the team to engineer an escape attempt. But when the French Resistance tunnel under the soccer stadium offers a way out, the team faces a dilemma – do they try for freedom or play for victory?

Benefiting from solid performances by Michael Caine as Colby, Game of Thrones star Max von Sydow as Major Steiner, and a bevy of then-current or semi-retired professional footballers in supporting roles, not the least of whom were Brazilian superstar Pelé and former England captain Bobby Moore, the movie was a modest box office success on its release in 1981. However, it garnered mixed reviews due to its perceived corniness and unlikely scenario.

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It comes as no surprise to find a remake has been on the cards as early as 2014. In 2019, the Spanish-American Jaume Collet-Serra (principally known for his directorial work on Liam Neeson vehicles Run All Night and The Commuter) was attached to direct. Details of the project’s development have yet to emerge, so we don’t yet know exactly what the modern take on Escape To Victory will look like, but here’s why we are excited.

An Offbeat WWII Film

     Paramount Pictures

Dunkirk and 1917 were both cinematic masterpieces, but with fashionable, tricksy narrative devices such as non-linear storytelling and extremely long camera shots, they were conventional war films about guns, bombs, and bullets. Stories about other aspects of war are worth telling, especially in the case of World War Two. De Gaulle (2020) moved a little way in this direction, with Babylon A.D. and Matrix franchise star Lambert Wilson playing the famous French general in a film that was as much about his relationship with his wife and children and their chaotic evacuation from war-torn France in the summer of 1940, as it was about de Gaulle’s famous radio speeches on the BBC that ultimately spurred the formation of the French Resistance.

Escape To Victory is likewise a character-driven piece about people being put in impossible positions and how they overcome those dilemmas. Sticking to that formula, rather than shoehorning battle scenes into the action, seems like a wise choice.

Many Real-Life Soccer Players Can Act

If there was one aspect of the original Escape To Victory that was in obvious need of improvement, it was in the acting of the footballers brought in to make up the team of captured Allied soldiers. Big names such as Moore and Argentinian World Cup winner Ossie Ardiles looked the part with the ball at their feet, but line readings were often wooden, to say the least. The cast was rounded out of all people by a post-Rocky Sylvester Stallone, whose affable performance as goalkeeper Robert Hatch was one of the film’s highlights.

But the switch from football to acting is a less surprising one today than it was forty years ago. In the 2000s, several soccer players built second careers in cinema. Chief among them were Manchester United’s Eric Cantona, who made a name for himself in French and English cinema after retiring from soccer, and Chelsea star Vinnie Jones, who forged a new career in Hollywood and London playing tough-guy characters in gangster and superhero films such as Swordfish and X-Men: The Last Stand.

The fact that so many of today’s players spend much of their time in front of a lens – either on the field or on a smartphone – arguably means that anyone drafted in to play the members of the POW team should feel rather more at home with acting duties than their 1980s counterparts.

A Happy-Ever-After War Film is Needed

In the spring of 2022, the specter of a new European war looms over the world. With real-life tragedies playing out on our TV screens and smartphones on a daily basis, it might just be that cinema-goers would appreciate a trip into less brutal territory. For most of its runtime, Escape To Victory focuses on the action on the football pitch, and the only bones that get broken belong to the team’s goalkeeper.

There is also Escape To Victory’s ending, which, if not conforming exactly to the standard Hollywood happy-ever-after formula – the Allied football team don’t win the game – gets closer to it than many of the film’s near contemporaries and left many a viewer walking out of the cinema with a spring in their step. If Collet-Serra can replicate the jauntiness, the good spirit, and the humor of the original film, the remake could well be a game worth watching.