Defiance

Looking around on the internet, it’s nice to see a lot of our level-headed US friends branding Defiance as “Jew propaganda”. You’d almost query what side they were on during the war.

Plot-in-a-nutshell: some Jewish brothers lose their family as the Nazi war machine ploughs into Poland. They set up a Robin Hood-like camp in the woods, recuing and hiding more Jews… then counter-attacking.

Daniel Craig plays the elder brother, Liev Schreiber the middle and Jamie Bell the runt of the litter. If this story is based close to true events then it’s rather soap opera-ish in its choice of characters. The two older brothers come to loggerheads and fall out. The  younger turns out to be as brave as his older siblings. It is a dramatisation, I suppose, but sometimes it’s nice for things to break the mould and Defiance just doesn’t seem to do that.

It is well-filmed, with one standout sequence seeing an attack on a German convoy segueing with a Jewish wedding. The other battle sequences are also quite brutal, but I just never felt caught up in stuff.

Craig’s Polish accent comes and goes, and it doesn’t make sense that in a single conversation characters will switch between Polish and English. Bell, actually, is far better at maintaining the accent.

I feel I should be writing more about the film,  but it just didn’t hook me enough. It’s a great story, certainly all the more so for being true, but it’s been ripped off so many times by Hollywood in the past that it seems like another run-of-the-mill war movie.

Maybe I was expecting too much, but Defiance is just fairly middle-of-the-road.