Very disappointing

Rating: 2/10 (27 November 2009)

I decided to watch this film because of the high IMDb rating and was very disappointed. Having recently re-watched "The Pianist", the contrast left "Black Book" looking very amateur and unconvincing. In the DVD extras, Paul Verhoeven claims to want to show wartime Holland and the resistance as it really was (supposedly he knows because he was 6 years old then), and to show the dilemmas between right and wrong on both sides. In fact, the shallow acting, pointless nudity and quite unrealistic story-line make this impossible.
For example, although there is a well-documented incident of the Germans executing two of their own deserters in a Canadian-run PoW camp in liberated Holland, the acting of a similar incident in "Black Book" is very shallow. The sight of the senior SS officer (Käutner) slamming the phone onto the Canadian's colonel's desk and daring him to phone his General to challenge the execution order is just laughable.
There are so many unconvincing moments in the film it is hard to know where to start. Here are just a couple:

why would Müntze be so naive as to go directly with Käutner to challenge Franken about the stolen Jewish valuables without first doing a proper investigation? Any senior officer worth his salt would have thought of that.

the emotional turmoil that someone like Rachel would feel while supposedly falling in love with an SS officer is hardly dealt with at all

Anyone looking for really worthwhile and historically accurate drama about the wartime resistance would do much better with the BBC TV series "Secret Army". This had a much lower budget but much better acting - especially the 3rd series, which includes exactly the themes which "Black Book" tries to handle (Belgian woman in love with a Gestapo officer; that same officer has a "good" German executed in a PoW camp)