I was first told about Andy McNabb from a half-insane guy who played the main character in a movie which was shot in my home town. I talked to him for a long time and we got talking about books and I mentioned I was a big Clancy fan. He said if I liked Clancy i should check out Andy McNabb. I hadn't seen Heat at the time but he recommended it because McNabb was a technical weapons training adviser on it. And he said that many people reacted very well to the fact that everyone in that movie held their guns and rifles correctly and changing the clip in a professional way. Later on i saw Heat and I was very impressed. I haven't read anything by McNabb yet but I think i will. definitely after seeing this.

The film Bravo Two Zero tells the story about eight SAS soldiers who was sent behind enemy lines in The Gulf War. The opening montage of this film sucked me straight in. a composition of old Gulf War footage and news reports. it then cuts to a title card which says that this is a true story accompanied with the song "Londons Calling" by The Clash. The film continues to be very realistic all the way through. Not much clichéd hero stuff but rather to quote that guy who first told me about McNabb: "It's about misery. This is a real story about a real James Bond. No champagne or beautiful women." And enemy is not portrayed as villains or dumb like in oh so many Hollywood films. It is rumored though that McNabb exaggerated a bit on how many enemies they killed but this isn't a very large factor in the story. The story is not about how many enemies they killed. It's about survival and misery.

This is very impressive for a TV movie and Sean Bean most certainly doesn't make it worse. Definitely recommended to you who like realistic stories like Tom Clancy's books.

Cheap-as-chips BBC war movie is hopeless from the start thanks to a ludicrous lack of realism, despite McNab's presence as military adviser behind the scenes. It strikes me that the excellent book by McNab was only skimmed superficially and then filmed, and certainly this television film barely resembles the riveting book which inspired it. In fact the only good thing about the whole production is Sean Bean's casting as McNab, once again Bean puts in a bravura performance, and his convincing turn here is the only nugget of gold in a whole mess of a production.

I reckon the BBC blew their budget on location filming in South Africa and the SAS training undertaken by the crew; everything does look cheap here, and for a film in which the effect largely depends on the realism, that isn't great. When the film can't even show you the guys getting out of the helicopter you wonder what you're in for. The African locations only barely resemble the original Iraqi landscape, for a start its far too flat and the BBC just didn't have to money to portray convincing below-zero temperates and unexpected snowfall. The camera cuts in close and stays close to the actors' faces, giving a claustrophobic feel even in the desert scenes, and something has definitely got to be wrong with that.

For some reason, Vince, Legs and Bob (the three who did not survive the mission) have their names changed to Ray, Baz and Tony, but seeing as they are named properly in the book you wonder just who this is protecting. The rest of the cast don't get much of a look in, but the characters don't come across at all and the actors are crap – Stan is portrayed as an idiot, Vince is played by a 16-stone guy who would never even some close to passing the selection process, and Chris is some long-haired chap, completely self-obsessed and arrogant. There are a couple of decent action sequences in the movie, done well on a low budget, with plenty of shooting and explosions, and I was glad that the film didn't shy away from the more gruesome and disgusting moments (like when Andy has to eat excrement). But because of length, whole swathes of plot and important detail is just cut out, leaving a choppy, poorly-edited mess of a film.

Lastly, the thing that really got to me was the lack of realism displayed here, in comparison to the book. I know it's a film and you have to hear what's going on, but having the characters shouting to each other whilst hiding in the wadi is just plain dumb; did the producers forget this was a covert mission, covert meaning stealth, not shouting like you're at a football match? There are other ludicrous moments like when we see Chris walking down a paved road to freedom, hmm, lucky he didn't get captured then, I thought he went cross-country necessarily to avoid being spotted. The biggest and most laughable flaw has to be Andy and his mates eating a bag of boiled sweets in the prison; I found that watching Bean crunching away on a sugary bit of confectionery, after reading in the book how McNab had his teeth smashed out so that it was painful to even breathe, simply and astoundingly inept.

I've given this film a good rating because, based as it is on a set of particular facts, it doesn't fit into the usual war-film mold. It may be so mainly by default, but that doesn't make it any less original. Here's the mold. A small group of soldiers sets out on a difficult mission. There are fire fights. Some of the men die. The enemy is faceless. The mission is successfully completed. If they are captured, they escape. If the patrol was cocky at the start, they return chastened. That template doesn't apply here.

In this film, the impression one gets is that the mission of the British patrol was only partly completed, since their presence was discovered and they had to leave their observation post under fire. In trying to reach the safety of the Syrian border the eight men lose each other. And Andy MacNab (Sean Bean) is captured by Iraqis.

The second half of the film has us watching his suffering in a special prison. The Iraqis aren't entirely faceless either. They beat hell out of MacNab but not before showing us some of the reasons for the Iraqi's rage. An elderly man, weeping operatically, uncovers the mutilated body of his son, one of the Iraqi soldiers killed during a fire fight, before throwing himself on a British prisoner and feebly squeezing and pinching his face. Later we learn that the patrol has killed more than a hundred Iraqis and put another hundred in the hospital.

The torture MacNab and the two other members of his patrol undergo is convincing without being overly dwelt on. He spends most of his time manacled, stripped, and blindfolded. A dentist pulls out one of MacNab's teeth. But the most telling degradation is when MacNab is forced to clean out a primitive toilet that has become clogged, using only his bare hands, and when finished, he is made to lick his hands clean. A viewer might ask if this is really "torture", and the answer might well be, "not according to the definition now employed by the US government, since there is no pain and no question of organ failure."

Unlike most fictional war stories, the three British prisoners don't escape. Moreover, MacNab tells his captors what they want to know about his unit and its mission, distributing little misleading lies here and there to diminish the value of the information. Of course MacNab protests the Iraqi treatment of him and his two colleagues because it isn't permitted by the Geneva Convention. His captor deals him a blow and adds, "We are not in Geneva."

MacNab and four others out of the eight-man patrol manage to reach home through the offices of the Red Cross. "War is barbaric," MacNab muses, but he holds little ill will against his torturers since they were just doing their jobs. He does, however, dislike the Iraqis who seemed to enjoy inflicting pain, and if he met one of them on the street, he would probably slug him. At least I THINK that's what he thought. The working-class accents and the slang were so thick that I was unable to understand some of the exchanges.

MacNab is pretty philosophical about his experiences, and not at all chastened or brutalized. Naturally war is barbaric, but MacNab knew that going in, and he has no intention of giving up the profession of arms. He doesn't seem to have any real enemies, doesn't hate anybody, and surely isn't anxious to be captured and tortured again, but what the hell, the army has given him a chance to be all he can be!

In the usual war movie, our side almost always wins, sometimes at great sacrifice. Here, the conflict kind of peters out, as great historical events have a way of doing. That may or may not make for a satisfying narrative, but it does resemble life a little more closely.