Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.

Not familiar with this one? I almost deleted this e-mail unread because I didn’t recognize the title and I’m trying to sort through about 4000 e-mails that came in last week while I wasn’t really checking them at all.

Then I remembered that there’s a trailer for this one already, and after watching it, I read the review. Great cast for this, and it’s certainly compelling story material. I’m not a big fan of Zwick’s lifeless Oscar bait movies, though, and after LAST SAMURAI, I’m not sure I’m exactly eager to sit through anything he makes again.

Maybe this’ll be different, though, and I know a lot of people are fans. I just want to see him return to the glory days of... er... GLORY. And the screening this guy went to was suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuper-early. Zwick's going to be tweaking this one for a while, and when it does hit screens at the end of the year, there's a good chance that what we see will be much tighter and leaner than the version this spy saw.

Still, let’s see what this guy has to say...

Hey Harry,

Red Redding here with a review of Defiance

Just to get this out of the way, I am a pretty big fan of Edward Zwick and I haven’t disliked any of his movies. Blood Diamond was a brutal action movie with great acting and I still think that The Last Samurai is underrated. So in going to see Defiance this early (it comes out October 1st), I assumed this was going to be a rough cut.

Unfortunately, it seems like it is pretty close to what the final cut will look like (aside from sound and image issues), and it saddens me to say that it isn’t a very strong outing.

The story starts off in early 1941 during World War II. We see two brothers, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell, returning to their house and seeing their father and mother massacred along with their neighbors. They find their other brother (George MacKay) hiding under the floor boards and quickly flee into the forest. They are then met by their final brother (Daniel Craig), all of them in the forest hiding together. They encounter other people and soon word gets out the brothers Bielski (their last name) are taking care of people and creating a community in the forest to escape from the Nazis. This is the basic setup and it follows their survival for roughly one year out of the three that they lived their.

What Worked:

Of Zwick’s films, this movie is more closely related to Glory and the Last Samurai, then to Blood Diamond. The focus isn’t on action (even though there are some good action scenes), but instead on the survivors and what lengths they had to go through to make ends meet. The film looks beautiful with some shots that rival anything in The Assassination of Jesse James or There Will Be Blood. Of course, the acting is top notch from all players and there is a real sense of camaraderie between the brothers and a real sense of community between the people in the forest. There are some tender moments and there is some humor injected that lightens a really heavy subject. The action, although not a primary focus, is very well done. This movie is paced very well and it doesn’t become repetitious or boring because they are always moving or defending themselves.

What Didn’t Work:

Even though this movie is paced very well, I think that its short run time (1 hour and 55 minutes by my watch) really doesn’t enable the main characters to be fleshed out. The movie starts off and we know absolutely nothing about these characters and by the end we still don’t know anything about them other than that they are good guys. It has impersonal personal characters dealing with a very harsh reality and it makes it hard to care about them. If this wasn’t a holocaust movie, there would be no reason to care about these characters because we never get to know them. That may seem harsh, but it is like they just assumed we wouldn’t care that there isn’t any character setup. If the movie started with even 10 to 15 minutes of just character building it would become so much more poignant. Also, part of this might be alleviated by the fact the James Newton Howard’s score was not in place yet and that the temp score was very low key.

Bottom Line:

I really wanted to like this movie so much, but I just could never really get into because the characters are not fleshed out. I felt that this movie was comparable to Schindler’s list (a story of survival in WWII) and that it paled in comparison to it. I believe that if they put in some backstory for these brothers, and make sure Howard’s score fits the mood (which I am sure it will), that this could be a great film.

But as it stands, it is just a mediocre/good movie which really lacks the emotional punch that they were going for.

6.5-7/10