could have been great, turned out a failure

Rating: 2/10 (15 March 2001)

The movie starts with some scenes ripped off from Saving Private Ryan, only not as good and not as shocking. None of the characters seem real (not even Jude Law, otherwise a great actor -Gattaca). There is no way anybody could be fooled even for even a brief moment that this is not a film. At the end of every scene that went wrong somewhere (cliché/not compelling/bad acting/shallowness/ combination), I couldn't stop thinking that this could and should have been a great movie, as both its basic story, theme and setting offer vast possibilities for this. There were too many characters in this film as well and you can't possibly relate to all of them. Most of the characters seem incredibly naive. It's been a long time since I've seen anything like this. Even most of the (combat) scenes are naive, until Jude Law and his newfound 'love' start doing it in a room filled with sleeping soldiers. This is without a doubt the most shocking scene in the movie (mainly because they all seem like oversized, dumb, innocent children instead of soldiers), but I'm quite sure this wasn't intentional. Ed Harris' play is ok, only he seems to be forgetting that he's not supposed to be a friendly guy in the story until all of a sudden he commits a horrible crime at the end of the movie (his 'nice guy turns nasty'-performance doesn't cut it in other words). Joseph Fiennes as Danilov is just plain ridiculous as are most of the other actors, who for the most part just play caricatures of past roles. Don't go check this out, even (or especially not) if history interests you.