Lack of good storyline.

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Charming and brutal

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Tom Selleck stars as General Dwight D. Eisenhower in the TV movie entitled,Ike: Countdown to D-Day. It follows the General in the three months leading up to the decisive invasion that would turn the tide of World War II toward the Allied powers.James Remar,Timothy Bottoms,Gerald McRaney and Ian Mune co-stars to play key supporting roles.It is directed by Robert Harmon.The D-Day invasion is the largest military operation of World War II.The TV movie opens with Winston Churchill appointing Eisenhower,better known as Ike, as the Supreme Allied Commander. He faces conflicts with British General Montgomery, American General George Patton, and French leader Charles de Gaulle.He must balance these men's egos as he organizes the risky but necessary military maneuver.Despite historical errors and inaccuracies,this TV movie is a very well done depiction of the events leading up to D-Day, headlined by one of the strongest performances of Tom Selleck's career. It manages to convey the sense of tension throughout every scene which is a testament to both the acting and the writing.

Many excellent historical connections and references. The final speech, though was apparently put in Ike's pocket, not handed to his aid. BTW, of all the nations involved The Canadians at Juno Beach were the only Force on D-Day to reach their objective despite about 50 percent casualties in the first wave of the attack. It is important to remember that while there were large numbers of Americans and British troops, that soldiers from many other nations participated as well. Many a non-British veteran will tell you how troops from other nations were used in vastly more dangerous areas than the British. This movie does show the huge amount of time spent waiting for action and the huge challenge in keeping the enemy uniformed. More about diversionary counter-intelligence would have been interesting. Nevertheless, the numbers of dead are staggering to read.

I tumbled to this one as part of a large pruning-out of a friend's DVD collection, and although this one won't be a keeper for my own library, it was still a worthwhile watch, if only for the novelty of Tom Selleck doing an extraordinary job of portraying Dwight D. Eisenhower.Mr. Selleck, to be totally honest, looks nothing like Eisenhower, even with his head and mustache shaved, but just as Gretchen Mol strutted her stuff to great effect in "The Notorious Bettie Page," Mr. Selleck rises to the occasion and embodies Ike with a remarkable verisimilitude that allows his audience to ignore the physical discrepancy. It is definitely one of Selleck's shining moments as an actor.The script has its problems, but this is no surprise in a talking heads story about the concerns of mounting the largest amphibious invasion in the history of warfare. Certain events are shuffled about and compressed temporally, some are created out of whole cloth, and a few seem to be egregious mistakes (cf. Ike's chat with troopers of the 101st Airborne on the wrong day), but mostly it's all in service of the story. Within the context of a two hour made-for-TV docu-drama, it works. Complaint can be made about the portrayal of various persons, notably General Patton, Field Marshall Montgomery, and Charles DeGaulle (whose nose isn't nearly big enough), but these are all minor lights orbiting the main star, Ike. If nothing else, the film properly leads one to further exploration of the events chronicled; there is a wealth of information out there, needless to say.Selleck really does a bang-up job, reining in his Magnum P.I. persona almost completely to portray a man who not only had the weight of the world on his shoulders, but also carried its very fate in his hands. I think Ike himself would have been pleased.

Not badly done, this story of the way Dwight D. Eisenhower managed to pull off the risky Normandy landings in 1944. It shows its low TV budget but I suppose we can do without still another majestic spectacle and settle for a little more in the way of a character study.Tom Selleck as Ike is surprisingly good. He's an unpretentious and likable guy, a hunk to women maybe but he seems to be accessible as a buddy too. That cracked voice maybe.Here he shrugs off his lackadaisical Magnum P. I. persona and does quite a good job of being Eisenhower, more adaptable than anyone might have thought. He's put on a few pounds for the role, had the hair shaved off his frontal area, and deepened his voice. There's another thing too. Eisenhower smoked like a volcano, and this is shown in the movie. He's constantly puffing away, as are many of the other characters. Smoking cigarettes wasn't the stigma then that it has now become. Butts were in your package of K rations, along with all-American chewing gum. The writers and producers were right to leave out some of Ike's pecadillos, like his affair with his aide, Kay Sommersby. There's no room for romance in this compact drama. But the smoking belongs. It's even used as a gag at Montgomery's expense, which I won't explain. It would have been tempting to drop all the cigarettes from the film and make it more PC. The film makers ought to be complimented on retaining them. The script of course doesn't give him any flaws. He's the hero after all. He never loses his temper. He doesn't browbeat anyone. Well, he DOES let his weather man, Stagg, have a couple of powerful jabs. He has doubts about the invasion schedule but not about himself. We see him doing one of the things Ike did best. He managed to pull together a team of disputatious colleagues and subordinates who were jealous of one another. (He did the same thing as president; he was like your nice uncle.) Every story has to have some sort of obstructionist. In this one it's Charles DeGaulle, who disapproves of Ike's plan and refuses to cooperate with the landings -- something that didn't happen in real life. He and Ike have an argument about who should make the announcement of the landings. It's left unresolved, an editorial imperfection. DeGaulle wasn't easy to work with. Winston Churchill remarked of him, "The heaviest cross I have to bear is the Cross of Lorraine." Selleck gets good support from the rest of the cast, whom we get to know fairly well. Especially neat is General Omar Bradley, even less pretentious than Ike. (Bradley is played by James Remar, whose name sounds as if it ought to mean something when spelled backwards, but it doesn't.) Man, you have to put these guys next to the pompous, prop-carrying MacArthur and his florid prose to appreciate their humility. Ike went on after the war to serve as president of Columbia University and was later elected president of the US for two terms. He was no more colorful as a politician than as a general, but he took us through eight years of the worst part of the Cold War, finally brought an end to the Korean conflict, and foresaw the rise of what he called "the military-industrial complex." A decent guy, and this is a pretty decent movie about a couple of extremely tense days in his life.