Great sports movies require a few critical elements to be present. They need some bona fide celebrities, someone who can play the sport in question and – possibly most ideally – a brilliant script. 1981’s Escape to Victory arguably has all three in place… but does that make it a great movie?

The film’s title reflects how much the plot owes to The Great Escape, which was released in 1963 and is about prisoners of war escaping from the Germans’ clutches. In Escape to Victory, the Allied prisoners of war attempt to escape the Germans’ clutches when… hang on, that’s exactly the same idea.

The crucial difference, of course, is football. The Allies don’t go for the same escape route that was blundered by Steve McQueen et al. Instead, they centre their attempts (or perhaps centre-half might be more appropriate) on an escape during a football match. Organised from a rabble into a rousing football team, the squad rely on the coaching and captaincy of two army Captains, Hatch and Colby, who are played by Sly Stallone and Michael Caine respectively.

With the Allied team due to escape the PoW camp at half-time in the game that has been arranged against their German captors, when half-time arrives they are unjustly 4-1 down. Quite against logic, they decide to play on during the second half (“But we can win this!”) and go on the attack in order to try to win the game.