Impressive comeback effort from the great Paul Verhoeven

Rating: 9/10 (28 January 2009)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
A boatload of wealthy Jews are slaughtered without mercy while making a secret journey to safety escaping the Nazis. What's special about this atrocity is that their valuables are stolen from them by an unknown German commander. One of the survivors is Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten) who witnessed the slaughter of her parents. Now hellbent on finding the guilty party and bringing them down, she joins forces with fellow resistance member Hoffman (Hans Akkermans) to infiltrate the Nazis after gaining the attention of Commander Muntze (Sebastian Koch) where she learns the man behind her parents death is higher up the ranks than she thought.
Plenty of older directors still hack away in Hollywood, but Paul Verhoeven seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth after 2000's Hollow Man. But out of nowhere he reappeared with this smaller scale, more independent offering set during World War II.
It has an unusual feel for a Verhoeven film. Gone are his trademark uses of excessive/gratuitous sex/violence/language used to punctuate an intelligent and observant story and instead we have a standard wartime thriller that could have been done by Stephen Spielberg with twice the budget. It has a more mature feel to most of his other stuff and stands out for it. You get the feeling this may even be more of a personal film to him, maybe. It's a gripping and suspenseful thriller with plenty of neat twists and turns to keep you riveted to the end. Plenty of films deal with wartime persecution from the Nazis to the Jews, but this casts a light on a different idea, that that some may have been killed and robbed, with those pretending to be resistance sympathizers setting them up for a very nasty fall.
Performances wise, in the lead role, van Houten carries the film strongly as the bereaved/vengeful Stein and her undercover personality Ellis De Veres. She has a great double act with Hoffman as her male partner and James Gandolfini lookalike Waldemar Kobus has presence as the burly officer behind her parent's death. Koch, who I recognized from the brilliant The Lives of Others, delivers an equally solid performance as Muntze, the commander with a tough exterior that hides a sensitive and sympathetic nature that gets him to see the evil of his cause.
The strangest Verhoeven film you'll ever see, but also a solid and compelling wartime thriller that perfectly justifies the lengthy running time. ****