The Belorussian band of brothers...

Rating: Null/10 (28 December 2009)

Although I'm not a religious type and know little of any details from the stories of the bible, the parallels this old-fashioned adventure story draws with Moses leading the chosen are unmistakable (although the events depicted here - based on fact, apparently - are on an undeniably smaller scale: instead of a parting of the Red Sea we get a wade through marshland).
Such lofty aspirations leave Ed Zwick's film open to questions about the wisdom of such a decision at best, and ridicule at worst. Needless to say, it's best to take the film's claims of authenticity with a pinch of salt and perhaps to overlook the pretentiousness at its core.
At the end of the day, Defiance is an old-fashioned war film that could easily have been made back in the forties or fifties. The story has been told a thousand times in a thousand different forms, and its' familiarity means the long running time becomes something of a chore. Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber give a good account of themselves as the brothers who find themselves leading a band of Jewish refugees from the Nazis, but the complexities of their relationship are only touched upon, meaning that key moments such as Zus's decision to join the Russian partisans seem to come out of the blue, with no accumulation of incidents to justify his choice.
Most other characters, other than Jamie Bell as the youngest brother, are genre stereotypes: the Jewish teacher, the Jewish intellectual, the stern Russian commander, etc, which lends the entire thing a 'by the numbers' feel that means the audience is never as involved in the refugee's plight as they ought to be. The film has its moments, and often looks beautiful, but you'll watch the end credits with the feeling that you've seen it all before.