Potentially Good Story But Unfocused Execution

Rating: 4/10 (21 February 2009)

This movie tells the story of a lesser known aspect of World War 2 in Eastern Europe, about the Bielski brothers, Tuvia, Zus, Asael and Aron. They were Belarussian Jews who were forced to hide out in the forests because Germans destroyed their village and massacred their families. There they end up leading more than a thousand other Jewish survivors to freedom. Their flight inevitably drew parallelisms to no less than the book of Exodus.
I did not like the storytelling too much as it was too disjointed and episodic. The drama was not told in an emotionally involving way. There were scenes that show the Bielski group rob and kill German sympathizers. There was a scene where the Jews beat a captured German officer to death. There was scene where Tuvia led his band of Jews to cross a river. Then there was the climactic (bur unrealistic) scene where the Jews fight and win over a group of fully-armed Germans with a tank. Yet there seems to be no fluidity that bind these scenes together.
The actors who played the Bielski brothers do not look like brothers at all. Daniel Craig, who played the idealistic eldest brother Tuvia, looked miscast to me in particular. He did not look like he belonged with the rest of the Jews he led. Liev Schrieber (as the more aggressive Zus) and Jamie Bell (as the young Asael) were more realistic and successful in their portrayal.
Technically, the movie looked average and unrealistic. The art direction and make-up looked haphazard. The editing of the gun battles was erratic. Even the Oscar-nominated musical score was not really memorable. And the overall direction by Edward Zwick seemed without a unifying focus, wasting a potentially good storyline.