entertaining but often preposterous war movie

Rating: 6/10 (29 January 2008)

"Black Book" may be based on a true story, but it often plays more like a corny wartime melodrama than a serious film about war. Suffice it to say, it has a lot of beautiful and glamorous people running around doing a lot of cloak-and-dagger espionage stuff - all while changing the course of history. That's not to say it isn't an enjoyable and entertaining picture, just that it doesn't rank up there in artistry and truth with the great European films about the Fascist era, classics like "Open City," "Forbidden Games," "The Shop on Main Street," "Das Boot," etc. When you boil it down to the bare essentials, the theme of "Black Book" seems to be that there's nothing like a little hair coloring and a bar of chocolate to help an attractive young girl survive the horrors of war.
Rachel Stein is a beautiful Jewish singer whose entire family is mowed down by the Nazis as they are fleeing occupied Holland (Rachel and her family are Germans currently hiding out in the Netherlands). As the sole survivor of the attack, Rachel quickly becomes active in the Dutch resistance, her assignment being to cozy up to a high-ranking Gestapo officer who has taken a liking to her. Soon she finds herself not only in bed with the Nazi but quite possibly in love with him as well.
Paul Verhoeven has directed the film much in the style of his big-scale Hollywood productions ("Robocop," "Total Recall") - that is to say with a great deal of energy but not a lot of emotion. The convoluted storyline often becomes muddled and difficult to follow, but Verhoeven compensates for this weakness by keeping the proceedings moving at a breakneck pace (which is a good thing since the film takes an exhausting two hours and twenty-five minutes to tell its story). Unfortunately, the movie has been fitted with a musical score that sounds as if it has been lifted from some third-rate espionage thriller from the 1960's. Carice van Houten has brio and spunk as the movie's heroine, running around from one dire predicament and hairbreadth escape to another - she's almost like a Dutch version of the perpetually imperiled Pauline - but most of the other actors simply get lost in the shuffle. And if you've ever doubted that chocolate is, indeed, the answer to all of life's problems, you will never do so again after seeing this movie.
I must say that, even though I enjoyed the film immensely, "Black Book" is probably the first serious film about Nazis that actually had me chuckling at wholly inappropriate places (some of the actors even hold their guns in a funny way). "Black Book" may be a Dutch film by rights, but it's strictly from Hollywood in its silliness and corn.