Fighting back

Rating: 4/10 (23 June 2016)

Defiance is a well meaning but bloated film that wants to depicts Jews more than just as passive victims in eastern Europe during World War 2.
Based on true facts of the Bielski brothers, Tuvia Bielski (Daniel Craig) is almost Moses like as he leads a band of Jews in the forest of Belarus to survival. He take in fleeing Jews, builds a society with rules of fairness so they do not live like animals. Fight any advancing militia and stave off hunger and disease.
His quick tempered brother Zus (Liev Schreiber) wants to take the fight to the Nazis and the collaborators and has little time to help fleeing Jews to survive. He sides with the Russians even though he knows that they too are anti semites.
Director Edward Zwick has to keep this two narrative strands going but the film is too disjointed and trite. The third brother Asael (Jamie Bell) is wasted as the one who has choose between his brothers and falls in love with one of the beautiful girls in the woods which causes friction with a rival who throws a challenge to Tuvia's authority.
The film is hackneyed, dreary and not even that interesting. The actors speak Russian and then shift to English with heavy accents. The film needed a lightness of touch and maybe even some humour to counterbalance the grimness.