
It's a good feeling to start the year's cinematic experience with a good movie. That's why I didn't go to see
Frank Miller's
The Spirit which has already been touted as the worst movie of 2009 - I'm sure you would have enjoyed reading that review but I would rather nor have spent €9.50 for the privilege of writing it. No, instead I went to see a movie about a group of Jews in Belarus who resisted the Nazi occupation.
Edward The Last Samurai Zwick's
Defiance is a beautifully shot adaptation of
Nechama Tec's book
Defiance: The Bielski Partisans. Based on the true story of four Jewish brothers who escape their German-occupied homeland and join the Soviet partisans to combat the Nazis, the brothers eventually rescue roughly 1,200 Jews and the movie tracks their struggle to evade invading German forces while still maintaining their mission to save Jewish lives.

The movie centres more on the two elder brothers,
Tuvia played by
Daniel Craig and
Zus played by the grossly underrated
Liev Schreiber and how they escape the occupation, exact revenge, help hundreds of fellow escaping jews, survive the wild and unforviving Winter - oh and and kill lots of Nazi's! The main source of drama is the brother's own conflict, while
Tuvia is seen as touchy-feely Moses who wishes the people to survive above all -
Zus prefers to express his grief through anger and an understandable desire to fight back.
Craig exhibits more charisma here than he did as
Bond in
Quantum of Solace, dispelling rumours that he lost the ability altogether. He's thorughly convincing as a leader of men but probably could've done with out the
Braveheart-esque speech on his while horse.
Zwick coaxes a passable local accent out of
Craig who wobbles it a bit throughout the course of the movie - nowhere near the perfect South African accent
Zwick got from
DiCaprio in
Blood Diamond.
Schreiber while not much better than
Craig in the accent department - outshines him as an actor here delivering a most powerful performance and I'm hoping that Hollywood will take more notice of him because of it.

There is a danger, especially to those who have no knowledge of history, to accept the events here a pure historical fact. However if you did, you would be in error. As with
Zwick's 1989 Oscar winning movie
Glory, there are many historical inaccuracies and omittions from accounts of the time including most notably in the press:
The Bielski Partisans' involvement with the Naliboki Massacre. However
Zwick is neither the first nor will he be the last to slightly bend the facts to make things look better when projected 50 feet high on the cinema screen and it's good that he does. The Polish newspaper
Gazeta Wyborcza has claimed the
Bielskis tended not to engage in combat with Germans as depicted in the film, but rather spent its energy stealing civilian supplies in order survive. Had the film remained true to this account however I don't imagine there'd be half the amount of stars at the bottom of this review.
I'll put
Defiance on a shelf with
Zwick's
Blood Diamond,
The Siege and
Courage Under Fire but it's beneath a shelf containing
Glory and
The Last Samurai.
Colonel Creedon Rating:
****