Friday, December 26, 2008

Defiance

Arriving in theaters just in time for the Holocaust-theme season is “Defiance” (which I mistakenly keep calling “Deliverance,” a remake of which with this film's cast would have been a much better idea), Edward Zwick's based-on-a-true-story account of four Jewish brothers who escape the Nazis before going on to form a resistance community in the Belarussian forest. Bizarrely, Zwick's film, written by the director and Clayton Frohman, is less an original story than a greatest-hits compilation—a glossy, formulaic summary of every WWII, Nazi-related movie ever made. People flee. People build. People starve. People fight. Repeat. “Defiance” is not so much a cohesive film as a series of interchangeable, broadstroked scenes—a movie on loop.

To read the rest of my review visit Slant.

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