Failed to deliver on almost every level...

Rating: 3/10 (8 April 2007)

Although I may have been biased after watching Saving Private Ryan a few days ago, I was absolutely dismayed by the lack of quality presented by this movie.
As a whole, the movie just seemed like the director was painfully trying to make everything fit together. The wolf scene in the beginning really did not have any correlation with the movie; although it suggested he may have been hesitant about taking lives, it was clear that he had no such qualms after the first 20 minutes.
The script was one of the worst I have seen. Despite Jude Law being a terrible selection for a war movie in the first place, they didn't have to give him a head start to his sub-par performance by providing him with laughable dialog. Some of these reviews talk about authenticity; what the hell did the director expect to accomplish by giving his actors cheesy lines that they read in accents completely opposite to what they should have been. I mean, we know Jude Law's British...let's not make it agonizingly obvious by making him use his normal accent as a Russian... By far the worst performance was the Russian with no teeth that gets shot in midair... I was actually laughing at his dialog because it was so forced and pathetic.
And if this weren't enough validation for me to slam this film, the director decided to throw in another forced element: a corny, trite love story. As if we needed another Pearl Harbor... As far-fetched as it was to have a female elite sniper that was moderately attractive and somehow in contact with both Law and Fiennes, Jean-Jacques Annaud decided to have her fall in love with Law and add some facetious gap-filler to his movie.
Seriously...the movie probably could have been squeezed into about 15 minutes and it would have been just as eventful; the only interesting parts were the battle scenes (which is where the three stars came from), which I thought portrayed not necessarily a historically accurate view of Stalingrad but a visually stunning one nonetheless. Props to Annaud for the one thing he did right. But his empty, implausible storyline that just made me sit back in my chair and wonder how much longer it would be until the pain was over absolutely ruined this movie. The nail in the coffin was finding out that the girl that got blown up by an artillery shell actually survived so that the movie could have a fairy tale ending. If you thought this movie was good, go see Saving Private Ryan or We Were Soldiers so you can see what a real war movie with good actors is supposed to be like.