My Review: Defiance (6/10)

"1941. Germany occupies Belorussia. SS death squads and local police round up Jews. Within weeks 50,000 are murdered. 1,000,000 more await deportation and death."

Defiance opens very abruptly and we are introduced to the harsh situation of the war from the get go. This is a good film, but it is difficult to set it apart from other movies of the genre which deal with the War and the persecution of the Jews. This is by no means Schinlder`s List although it tries very hard to look like it. The characters are just thrown at us right away and there is no time to identify with them. It seems that there was so much the director, Edward Zwick, wanted to include in the film that he hurried to get everything on screen and forgot to focus on the characters. The first 20 minutes felt like Zwick was trying to fast forward everything to the main part of the movie which was establishing the Jew camp in the woods. Defiance is based on the true story of the Bielski brothers who hid thousands of persecuted Jews in a camp in the woods where they battled cold and hunger together for several years. This will probably be the least memorable of Zwick`s films because it lacks what other of his movies had which was more character depth, but this is still a good movie, just not as good as his other films like Glory, Legends of the Fall, Shakespeare in Love (for which he won an Oscar), The Last Samurai, or Blood Diamond. What can`t be denied is that Zwick always gets the best performances from his actors in his movies and Craig Daniels was not the exception here. He was great along with Liev Schreiber in this movie.

The movie takes place in 1941 in a village of Belarus that the Germans just occupied and have begun killing the Jews that reside there. Zus (Liev Schreiber from X-Men Origins) and Asael (Jamie Bell from Billy Elliot) Bielski return home from the woods to find their parents killed by German officials. The only survivor is their little brother Aron (George MacKay) who was hiding when the incident took place. The three brothers flee to the woods where they meet their elder brother Tuvia (Daniel Craig from Casino Royale) and together they decide to hide in the woods and plan their revenge on the officials who murdered their parents. They try to find a way to gather enough food to survive while at the same time find weapons in order to be able to defend themselves. Many other runaway Jews end up in the woods as well and together they form a sort of community where each is assigned specific roles and duties. Tuvia becomes the leader of the group and forms a sort of resistance against the Germans. Tuvia and Zus have some disputes because Tuvia keeps on accepting more and more people in the camp and offering them refugee while Zus wants to fight against the Germans. Zus ends up abandoning the group along with some other men and join the Russian army. The plot mostly follows the hardships that Tuvia and his people had to endure in the cold weather dealing with hunger and also persecution from German officials. There is a lot of drama, but plenty of action and suspense as well because the plot also follows Zus fighting alongside the Russian army.

The movie really seems to drag at some points and during others it seems as though it is going to pick up but it never really manages to do so. It is a good film, but it seemed to have lacked some more character development in order to be memorable. The film gave me the feeling that something was missing and all the pieces didn`t seem to fit together so smoothly. Daniel Craig gave a good performance along with the rest of the cast and that is what perhaps gives this movie a passing grade along with the heartwarming and powerful story that these films based on true events tend to produce in the viewers. Defiance is not a bad film, it just doesn`t live up to some of the other films that Zwick has directed.

http://estebueno10.blogspot.com/