In the hands of the wrong story-tellers.

Rating: 5/10 (10 September 2001)

Stalingrad wasn't the definitive movie about the most terrible and infamous of struggles during WW2, though it is still the best thus far. So many awful and fascinating things happened during the siege of Stalingrad that we never quite get the kind of treatment it deserves on film. A Das Boot or Saving Private Ryan of Stalingrad movies as it were. We are just given mere glimpses of what it must have been like. And here in Enemy at the Gates we are subjected to just more glimpses -- another melodramatic, supposed suspense tale using the war torn city as a canvas. The story holds promise but the method in which it unfolds is too self centred to make it believable. Movies tend to bottle historical events so that every other detail surrounding them seems incidental and detached, like we are seeing them with tunnel-vision. Here is no exception as a single sniper becomes the be all end of all of Soviet survival in a battle they needed desperately to win. To focus on such a small personal duel can only work if there is a conflict behind it. The study in contrast for example of one man who kills for pleasure and the other who kills only for necessity. Here both men are emotionless killers and exert not enough depth of character to generate some kind of hatred or admiration for each other's ability. Harris is the focus of villainy because he's the German invader and Law is cute and cuddly because he's the youthful put upon Russian. Neither character stands for anything beyond that and both then go out and spatter brains all over the rubble in the name of one dimensional entertainment.
Ed Harris turns in probably his worst performance here as a superficial and cold nazi with no insight into what makes him tick. We just find that he's capable of a most heinous and cliched act eventually to get his man, a contrived device so as to put no doubt in the audience's mind who's evil and to get them demanding his blood in the end. Which they get in a most
dubious way.
Not interesting or educational as a war film, not suspenseful as a thriller (with it's dreadful pacing), and most certainly not even remotely entertaining for its phoney love triangle, Enemy at the Gates amounts to just a flawed and mediocre old fashioned Hollywood yarn incorporating Spielberg's ground-breaking depiction of combat realism. (fake bravado in the Russian charges not withstanding)

A waste of a good set and some authentic uniforms. Maybe one day someone will make a real film about Stalingrad.