Hollywood can't beat this!!!

Rating: 10/10 (2 September 2013)

This movie has everything!!! I was disappointed at the end because I didn't see Hitler fly into Paris on a Zeppelin balloon, jump on a bicycle and win the Tour de France, bribing the officials with stolen jewels from murdered Jews. But other than that, it simply has everything. Every single plot twist ever shown on the screen before, or to be found in pulp fiction smut magazines of the Forties. Naked sexy chicks? Got it. Mean Nazis whipping and having sex with said naked sexy chicks? Got it. Nazis shooting double-crossed innocents? Yup, got that, times three or four! I must correct other reviewers who seem to think this movie was based on fact. The titles actually say that it was inspired by true events. It was also inspired by the cigarettes they smoke in Holland that are not legally available elsewhere. I will give the writers some credit – there actually was a second world war, but that's about as far as the movie parallels reality.
There are, in point of fact, about twenty betrayals and double-crosses in the plot, and a few false double-crosses where the lead character is thought to be a double-crosser but isn't really and she must prove her innocence before she can be killed. So on that score, this film wins on sheer volume and repetition of a plot mechanism. It becomes somewhat difficult to bear when we see Canadian soldiers hand out rifles to captured Germans after the war so they can shoot one of their own, a gentle, kind-hearted, sweetheart of a man who's in charge of the Gestapo and secretly saving the lives of guilty resistance fighters.
The film also can win the Most Implausible Coincidences award for all the incidents that it uses to move a sluggish plot forward. For instance, how did the evil Dutch doctor (muahahaha) know that our intrepid Jewish heroine would convulse in uncontrollable grief upon hearing of the death of her Gestapo-boss lover? So that he could inject her with a 'sedative'. (muahahaha!!!) And why did the after-war prisoners (collaborators) haul up a cauldron of sewage twenty feet into the air? Is that what you do with sewage? Haul it up in the air? Just so it could be poured by the gang of haters onto our heroine? Did they know she'd be there? The worst of the implausible events is when the resistance fighters try to kidnap a double-crosser who leads Jews to their deaths in order to steal their wealth. The evil-doer (muahahaha) puts up a struggle and gets the upper hand, and a religious zealot has the only working gun, but he can't shoot because he'd be taking a life. The heroine is being strangled to death but the Christian can't kill to save her. The villain calls her a 'damn' whore and the Christian is so overcome with anger at the swearing that he is now able to start shooting the evil swearing man. He fills him with bullets and his friends have to pull him away from shooting more, not for choking a woman mind you, but for blaspheming. Only gold leaf can be stretched this far, but credulity, mmmm, not so much.
Here is some truth about Holland's contribution to the war. It had a popular Nazi party. It fielded more than 25,000 soldiers to fight along side the Germans in Dutch SS divisions on the Russian front. This film about intense underground warfare, a complete myth, is nothing more than an attempt to firmly lock the closets, paper over the wall, and hide the skeletons of a not-so-glorious past. That can be the only explanation why such a fantasy could receive government funding. Blackbook is a brilliant example of inept writing, re-using plot twists and double-crosses, sex and violence ad nauseum, not until the story had come to a logical end, but until the funding ran out. Unfortunately, it also succeeds in draining one's patience, and I apologize to the actors. It must have required extreme professionalism to give top notch performances without bursting into laughter after each take, and to their credit they did not.