Defiance

Daniel Craig plays one of the real-life Bielski brothers, who hide out in the Naliboki Forest, on the banks of the Newman River, from 1942 to 1945.

After Tom Cruise's shaky Hitler drama Valkyrie and Kate Winslet's dubious Nazi love story The Reader, the revisionist Second World War movie bandwagon rolls on with the Bond star Daniel Craig in Defiance. Conventional wisdom about the war gets inverted again as Craig and his co-stars Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell play the real-life Bielski brothers, three Jewish peasant farmers from Belarus who held the Nazis at bay during the war and saved the lives of 1,200 Jews. Hiding out in the Naliboki Forest, on the banks of the Newman River, from 1942 to 1945, the brothers established makeshift camps for refugees and launched savage revenge attacks on Nazi soldiers and their collaborators. So far, so inspirational, and yet the movie, written and directed by Edward Zwick (Blood Diamond), struggles. It opts for action-adventure gloss when the material was clearly crying out for a more measured approach. Here the brothers quickly become ciphers rather than flesh-and-blood characters. There are plenty of pulse-quickening shoot-outs and high-octane ambushes. It's exciting stuff, but the real story of the Bielski brothers will have to wait.