Big budget but neither vision nor story

Rating: 4/10 (4 October 2006)

This movie is just as cheap, flat, vulgar and cliché as the Dutch movies from Paul Verhoeven before he left off to the United States. Which was kind of OK in the seventies. (Did we know any better? At least we hardly had any better.) But I expected this director to have evolved since then. He has not, not a single bit. And so yet again, all women characters are whores, and we get to see some nice tits.
I have evolved however, and seeing (yet another) WWII movie, 2.5 hours long even, without providing a single new perspective on the subject, was a totally depressing experience I cannot recommend to anyone.
The most "tenenkrommend" (toe-crunching) scene is with Theo Maassen, in an orgy of overacted anger and humiliation, so grotesk and over the top, you can almost hear Paul ejaculating behind the camera when the main character gets a bathtub full of human feces over her naked body...
Since Paul Verhoeven left Holland, there's a lot of talk about the "grey history" of World War II, in which most people were neither good or bad, but something in between. This movie flirts with that idea, but paints the same old caricatures in either black or white nevertheless, caricatures that are so familiar in Dutch cinema: the cruel Nazi, the brave Dutch. That someone from the resistance turns out to be a working for the other side (and therefore, in Paul's universe, is ultra ultra ultra evil), is the "thriller" part that carries the film, but that's not at all what "grey history" is about...
Oh, maybe the new concept is that there is actually a single "good" German officer in this movie. Well, bravo. But considering 61 years have passed since the end of the war, I am not impressed.