denis888 It seemed to be an excellent idea to make a WWII movie, set in Belarus in 1941-1945, showing the (in)famous Belski Brothers, who were Jews making their partisan camp and fighting against the oppressors. The problems stated immediately when I saw the casting. Don't get me wrong, Liev Screiber is a great choice, but Daniel Craig was clearly wrong. He is again a James Bond character, cool and defiant (Pun intended), but he lacks depth and is not convincing as a Jew. The rest of the casting is rather bland and bleak, so you will hardly remember anybody there. The second problem is the historic accuracy. I will not dwell onto details, but in reality that was not so simple as in the movie, as The Belskis fought not just Germans. The reality was much more convoluted, complicated and mixed. The third and really puzzling aspect is - why on earth do they speak a very weird mixture of typically simplified and wronged English and suddenly in Russia. I am Russian, and I was almost jumping on my chair hearing these sudden jumps from broken English to quite clean Russian. Liev speaks Russian better, by the way. Then the battle scenes - well, this shaky camera, these typical explosions, these bullets fatty zing-zanging onto soil - all of that is so ...wel.. Hollywood. The whole battle thing here is so hasty, kinky and wry that it leaves a feeling of utter disbelief. The overall impression - no, this is not your ultimate war movie. It leaves you cold and never lets the feeling of artificial setting go away. My rating - 2.

HB Is Edward Zwick the dullest filmmaker in America? He's certainly one of the most infuriating--time and again discovering fascinating stories buried in the corners of history, only to completely botch their revelation. Zwick movies invariably balloon into lumbering white elephants, embalmed in the icky molasses of awards-season prestige and corny Hollywood contrivances.The Last Samurai could've been an absorbing take on ancient tradition colliding with a modern world, but instead devolved into a lovingly photographed tribute to the wind blowing through Tom Cruise's hair in slow motion.Blood Diamond had all the ingredients of a gripping, topical thriller, but instead played out as a morbid procession of Oscar clips, climaxing with the preposterous sight of a gutshot Leonardo DiCaprio making not one but two weepy farewell phone calls while in the middle of a gunfight.There's a specific sort of turgidness to an Edward Zwick film, an oatmeal blandness evident since his feature debut, 23 years ago, when he distorted David Mamet's scathing play Sexual Perversity in Chicago into a sitcom-like vehicle for Rob Lowe and Demi Moore called About Last Night ...There's obviously no material that this man can't flatten with his tedious middlebrow sensibility.Zwick does it again with Defiance, making a cheesy mess out of the captivating, little-known tale of the Bielski otriad. In 1941, four hard-drinking, rough-hewn criminal brothers headed deep into the Belarusian forest, building a kibbutz where they and fellow Jews could hide from Hitler's goons and wait out the war. The Bielski brothers saved hundreds of lives, but these wondrous facts don't provide enough nobility for Zwick. This is such a damned good story, he's determined to oversell it.Daniel Craig--the blonde-haired, blue-eyed 007 who apparently became an honorary Jew after Stephen Spielberg cast him in Munich--stars as Tuvia Bielski, and we can tell right away he's supposed to be the hero because he makes gaseous proclamations from atop a white horse, his every utterance underscored by a martial bleat from of composer James Newton Howard's trumpets. The rest of the people in the movie are always seen gazing upward at him in slackjawed awe.Well, everybody except for Zus, Tuvia's hot-headed little brother, played with a swarthy intensity by Liev Schreiber. Zus just wants to kill as many Germans as he can, but Tuvia insists that "living will be our revenge." These two have many tiresome parable-inflected arguments that play like bad knockoffs of the Talmudic debates Tony Kushner wrote for Munich.Meanwhile, the third brother, Asael (Jamie Bell), sheepishly stands off to the side, presumably wondering the same thing as the audience: What casting director in their right mind thought James Bond, Liev Schreiber and Billy Elliot could pass for brothers? Shot by cinematographer Eduardo Serra in that same digitally tweaked, washed-out color palate that's become the cliché for WWII movies since Saving Private Ryan, Defiance ignores what's most interesting about its own story in favor of a ton of stock scenes we've already seen; there are no surprises here. When the saintly elderly Hasidic comic abruptly coughs mid-quip, everybody knows what's going to happen to him within the next 10 minutes. There's even a gooey romance between Craig and Alexa Davalos, which arrives out of left field and seems to be motivated by a producer's decree that every big-budget Hollywood film must have a romance in there somewhere.Still hungry for vengeance, Schreiber's Zus takes off to fight with the Russians. Zwick and his co-screenwriter Clayton Frohman take a couple of jabs at the irony of Jews enlisting alongside a bunch of virulent Anti-Semites, but as is the case with any potentially interesting idea in Defiance, this one takes a back seat to the plot mechanics of a risibly inauthentic rescue sequence.By the time estranged brother Zus rides in like Han Solo to save Moses Skywalker's butt at the exact moment when things look hopeless, Zwick's done it again. He's made a true story feel awfully false.

Dan Ashley (DanLives1980) What with all the stories told from every faction of WWII and how everybody trounced those pesky Nazi Germans, things can get a bit formulaic! Defiance is a war era drama that takes a different stance, in fact it takes two; standing with one foot in the campgrounds of the Russian Partisans and the other in the camps of the Jews who dared to escape into the woods of Belorussia and Poland to survive the Holocaust.It sports some finely crafted drama, though not perfect. It just does the best with what it has and thankfully it has authenticity and great acting on its side, despite some shortcomings and incidences of overstepping the mark.Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber play the two older brothers of a slain Jewish Belorussian family who flee with their younger siblings into the woods, chased not only by Nazis but the police forces of their own communities who have sided with the enemy.One brother goes on to lead the growing number of escaping Jews while the other - ostracised after rising tensions - joins the Partisans.The story is sometimes sporadic in its delivery of drama and incidence, meaning that one theme is sometimes forgotten for the sake of a bit of action. Don't get me wrong, some of the action is superbly done, but I felt that there were some rushed scenes.While all very well executed, I feel that Defiance suffered an occasional conflict in direction and style, but most viewers might not even notice this.Craig and Schreiber's Russian is spot on and at times even seems playfully competitive, which adds much needed chemistry to such an ambitious tale of family. Jamie Bell is also on form.Overall a fine effort, even though I felt it might actually have had more impact were it half an hour shorter.

alvarius777 Before I give my criticism, here are the good things: 1) costumes are good. so are all the props. 2) camera work is good 3) as a generic movie, it's not bad Now to the things that to me, make this movie a piece of crap. ABOUT 80% OF THE STORY ARE LIES! And while I don't mind Hollywood fiction, this is going beyond that. The Bielski brothers in the movie are given credit for AT LEAST twice as much as they actually did. AND the crimes they committed are never mentioned. To me, as a Pole, this is unacceptable. Germans are shown in WW II movies as the bad guys.. killing, abusing, torturing etc. Yet in this case, the "heroes" weren't that much different. The bielski brothers sided with soviets and abused and persecuted the Polish people. They helped the soviet military and police hunt down, capture and execute almost 200 of polish resistance fighters from the A.K. (Armia Krajowa - National Army) who fought for free, independent Poland against BOTH the soviets and Germans. They took part in AT LEAST 2 documented civilian purges, and raided the victim's belongings and homes afterwards. Yes, they did help other Jews. But they did it by committing war crimes and numerous other atrocities on the Polish civilians and the underground freedom fighters who only wanted their nation free and unbound by foreign occupants. In that aspect this movie is AN ABSOLUTE LIE, spreading false information and made up facts, romanticizing criminals and abusing the memory of the people who died by their hand and as a result of their actions.