“A potentially exceptional story is told in a flatly unexceptional manner,” writes Variety’s Todd McCarthy in his review of Edward Zwick’s upcoming WWII film, “Defiance.”
We just started reading the script and took an instant liking to it, but yeah, great stories can be easily messed up, as per McCarthy’s aforementioned opening line.
Daniel Craig, Live Schreiber and Jamie Bell play three brothers in this true WWII-set story about a group of Jews that fled into the woods of Nazi-occupied Poland in 1942, and recruited other exiles to build a village in a violent campaign of resistance.
Apparently they were as violent as a Quentin Tarantino movie “They decapitated a guy who ratted them out, and left his head in the center of the town,” Schreiber told EW earlier this year.
McCarthy continues, seemingly not impressed. “Zwick’s version of the grim but inspirational events becomes more conventional as it goes, topped by a climax straight out of countless war pics and Westerns. Presence of Craig and Schreiber in tough macho guise will attract some action fans, and Holocaust-related theme will draw others, but overall commercial prospects appear modest.”
“[Eventually, it all becomes pretty standard-issue stuff, filled with noble and tragic heroism, familiar battle images and last-second rescues. None of the suffering, sacrifices, anxieties or tests of heart and soul are rendered with any special dimension or heightened force, nor depicted with anything near the staggering, hallucinatory impact of the two great Russian films to have depicted events in wartime Belorussia, Larisa Shepitko’s 1977 “The Ascent” and her husband Elem Klimov’s 1985 “Come and See.”
Hmm, doesn’t bode super well. Zwick hasn’t made a super great film in a while. “Glory” is one of our faves, but that was also in 1989. The sweepingness of “The Last Samurai” missed the mark and “Blood Diamond,” didn’t do it for us at all (though 1996’s “Courage Under Fire,” is really underrated). We still need to dig deeper into the script. It’s rare that one sucks us in immediately, and this one totally did.