Great story but lacks real focus

Rating: 7/10 (1 January 2009)

Defiance is a good effort - not as good as Katyn which tells a different story of a massacre and was released this year - to tell a tale worth the telling.
It suffers from being too long and under-directed in places but it has a good cast and sense of purpose.
It is best in the action scenes and maintains a sense of story elsewhere - it is a worthwhile watch, but I must agree with other critics here who comment that it looks too made for TV there is very little camera action excepting straight story -telling and the film is entirely linear and lacks a directorial cohesion and vision that would have lifted the excellent story to another plane.
Overall, definitely worth viewing, but lacks greatness.