What a hunk of cheese!

Rating: 2/10 (7 May 2008)

Leave it to Paul "Subtle as a sledgehammer on the head" Verhoeven to come up with a WW2 film that is very cheesy and insulting at the same time. After being basically cast out of Hollywood after making a string of several awful movies, Verhoeven said he returned to his "roots" when he decided to shoot this film. Well, BLACK BOOK is even cheesier than any of his Hollywood films.
The whole thing is like a standard murder thriller set against the German occupation of Holland. An entire Jewish family is slaughtered while trying to escape the country. Only a young plucky woman, who's already part of the resistance, escapes from the massacre and decides to infiltrate the German occupation and seek those who murdered her family. There isn't a cliché in the book, black or not, that's not used here to tell this overly elaborate and often unintentionally funny spy tale.
What's so bad about it? The convoluted murder/mystery/spy story that's propelled forward not because there's anything remotely interesting or compelling about it but because the script demands it? The monotonous tone of the film or the main actress who's as expressive as Robocop? The truly unintentionally funny moments that belie the serious intentions of the director? The typically gratuitous Verhoeven touches regarding violence and nudity? The TV-movie feel of the whole project? The complete implausibilities of the story that wouldn't even cut it in a 1930s serial?
Stand-out scenes like when they try to chloroform a man who suddenly starts pummeling the clumsy members of the resistance, Verhoeven reveling in every kick and punches the bad guy was inflicting on the poor saps, made me laugh out loud. This overdone scene totally derailed the movie. But things only got worse after that. And worse, and worse. The symbolic ending with the hearse and coffin made my eyes roll.
This brings me to another point about every Paul Verhoeven film: there's always an unsettling amount of gratuitous violence in them, and BLACK BOOK is no exception. You can't make a serious film about WW2 if you revel in violence. Almost the entire cast of BLACK BOOK is eviscerated in one gory fashion or another. This is not shocking to me, since this is from the same director of TOTAL RECALL (or TOTAL WRECK-ALL) but I've honestly given up on Paul Verhoeven. He could have easily redeemed himself here with this film and yet it only reinforces the dire qualities of his previous stink bombs, like SHOWGIRLS, that Verhoeven is only interested in the crude and sensational, nothing about the human experience or even the craft of film-making.