This is one of the few Daniel Craig movies that didn’t immediately ratchet my inferiority complex up to a new level. The movie stars Craig and Liev Schreiber as Jewish brothers living in Byelorussia during the time of the Nazis. They end up rescuing many Jews from the area and staking and decamping from the cities and ghettos to the forest, where they could live relatively freely.
They struggle with the ethical issues you’d expect: whether or not to brutally murder a captured Nazi for revenge, and whether or not by doing so they become as bad as them. Of course such quandaries are at the heart of debates regarding the Israeli-Palestinian issue, though of course as everyone has already pointed out, the Jews invading Gaza today are not the ones that escaped the Shoah.
Back to the movie: fairly good combination of action and drama. The love story parts are fairly boilerplate. The scenes with Schreiber as a Red Army soldier facing anti-Semitism from his Russian comrades are interesting. The Abel-Cain split between the brothers and their philosophies is a common trope, but the filmmakers made it fairly interesting. Of course, in the end, one of them comes riding out of nowhere to save the ass of the other just when all seems to be lost, and then they hug and make up.
There are few typical Biblical moments of truth, which are not quite trite, but are so expected by anyone conversant in Hollywood conventions that its effect cannot be but dampened, somewhat.
On the other hand there was one moment, during a funeral, where the Rabbi says something interesting about asking God to take back the covenant he offered the Jews. The Rabbi was saying something about not wanting to be the chosen people, and all the baggage that came with it. Interesting but they cut from it fairly quickly, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it.
All in all: not a fantastic, movie, but not bad. Some gritty action scenes. And of course, Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber kicking ass with their faux-Slavic accents is always cool. It’s harder to be smitten with Daniel Craig when he’s not speaking that posh British English. And it’s a bit of change to, which is nice, after Bond and Confessions.
Someone’s been productive…
Watching Daniel Craig always makes me want to drop my popcorn and rush to the gym. Which, as the movie theater I go to is on the same mall floor as my gym, works out pretty well.
It’s always a pleasure and inspiration to watch intensely physical actors, and sadly it seems there are very few female equivalents. Female “action” stars usually have backgrounds in dance so they move prettily, but hardly have the strength and physicality to convincingly punch through paper. (And some of the worst offenders, alas, are Asian actresses like Zhang Ziyi, Maggie Q, Kristin Kreuk.) The only exceptions I can think of are Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 and Eliza Dushku (sp?) in the Buffy/Angel series. The latter was always much more convincing than the pathetically flailing mouse paws of Sarah Michelle Geller – but even she was better than most. Ah well, one more case of having to rely on men for most of my “role models”.
If your interested in this subject there is the original documents plus other research available. The Germans that hunted these people were the SS-Police. The same people who shot over a million people at close range. They would conduct operations just to find Jews, and other partisans, then kill everyone. Certain areas were cleared of everything and everyone, and the villages burned down.
You will need to be able to read German for a lot of these documents.
thegermanpolice.com