Defiance: Critic Reviews

Defiance bogs down in a not very well-developed script. It's a repetitive stop-and-start action film, and Tuvia and Zus don't have enough layers.
 But they do kick ass charismatically.

Edward Zwick's stiff, musclebound new movie tells the true story of the Bielski partisans, who fought the Nazis and rescued hundreds of Jews through the darkest years of war and genocide.

Defiance makes a noise but leaves no echo. It feels progressively more bogus and less significant the further it recedes from view, and myths are meant to wax in the memory, not wane.

Defiance resists bold, passionate storytelling and delivers something rather conventional.

Craig and Schreiber are terrific as the slightly thuggish Bielskis, and they're joined by an able supporting cast that includes Jamie Bell and the wonderful Mia Wasikowska.

What the Bielski brothers did in the forests of Belorussia deserves to be remembered and celebrated, but this glossy studio production robs them of life. It's not just new Holocaust stories that we need, but new ways of telling them.

if there's one instance of the road to perdition paved with fat budgets and good intentions, it's Defiance, or, as I prefer to call it, Custersky's Last Stand in Belarus.

Defiance isn't afraid to stand apart.

Despite all the resources brought to bear -- strong cast, ambitious scale, impressive logistics, dense detail, fine cinematography -- the production seldom makes the leap from elaborate play-acting to authentic drama.

It is, all in all, a film as square-shouldered as its leads -- tough-minded, forcibly acted and conventionally spun by Zwick and co-writer Clayton Frohman.

Occasionally schmaltzy, to be sure, but Schreiber makes a surprisingly awesome Rambo stand-in.

The picture offers the most moving account we've ever had of how an ordinary, rather disagreeable man, challenged and then electrified by catastrophe, grows into a great leader.

The story of Defiance has all the makings of a deep emotional experience, but I found myself oddly detached.

The script hokes up the tensions between the brothers played by Craig and Schreiber, and while they're both fascinating, simmering-kettle performers, they consistently outshine their material.

Zwick, intent on correcting the perception of Jews as passive victims, lets the action set pieces overwhelm the more intimate scenes, several of which are already diminished by stilted dialogue.

Defiance is a wobbly stool, a seat propped up by the uneven legs of ethics debate, Holocaust movie and action thriller. Still, the fascination and novelty of Nazi-killing Jews who don't perish in the death camps packs quite the wallop.

The resistance drama Defiance just doesn't seem to have anything to add to the swastika overload currently clogging the nation's theaters.

The story is inspirational; the movie isn't.

Plays at times more like a soap opera than what it really is, a story that more of the world deserves to know.

A potentially exceptional story is told in a flatly unexceptional manner in Defiance.

Defiance plods where it should soar, but it's still the best of this month's four (!) Holocaust movies -- if for no other reason than it confronts the common belief that European Jews didn't actively resist the Nazi onslaught.

As corny and downright flirtatious as this 'Holocaust drama' gets, it's still a vivid and heroic look at a side of that tragedy that we haven't seen before.

It's understandable and laudable that they desire not to sensationalize the Bielskis, and they've made a worthy film. But their understated approach makes the struggle seem less urgent than it must surely have been.

The problem is the screenplay, which has weak, unforceful dialogue and tends to substitute dramatic events for characterization.

What is puzzling is how Edward Zwick has taken an extraordinary real-life story about a handful of people who defied huge odds, and turned it into an utterly conventional war movie.