Defiance / With The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Good, The Reader and Valkyrie, Hollywood has the Third Reich on the brain this awards season. Of all the years, there’s finally a new Indiana Jones movie and Indy’s stuck fighting the Russians. Go figure. Defiance is the shallowest of the bunch, using the Holocaust as a rousing excuse to blow up tanks.

Edward Zwick’s movies tend to be noble, saccharine prattle surrounded by excellent production values, i.e. The Siege, The Last Samurai and Blood Diamond. The director’s oeuvre is successfully crowd-pleasing to say the least, but an argument can be made that’s he never actually made a truly decent film. Yes, he loves a great war scene filled with barrels of exploding dirt, but he’s gonna make a bigger bomb-crater by bashing his audience over the head with melodrama until they realize how gosh-darn courageous the sacrificial combatants are. Considering his previous titles (Glory and Courage Under Fire) Zwick is probably bummed he was not able to use the Braveheart for his latest opus.

Based on a true story, the Jewish Tuvia Bielski avenges the death of his family at the hands of the Nazis in 1941 Poland and escapes to the forests of Belarussia to ride out the invasion with his two younger brothers played by Liev Schreiber and an all-grown up Billy Elliot trying to grow his facial hair. The Bielskis never killed a human before, but instantly they become lean mean, bloodthirsty fighting machines.

Survivors begin to flock to them for protection, word spreads and soon, the three men are leaders of a community over a thousand Jewish refugees living under the trees and foraging for food, all the while hiding from the constant Nazi patrols and bomber planes. At the times they are discovered, they fight back; the Bielskis are basically a trio of Schindlers, but instead of lists, they wield machine guns.

In the end, the flick is 15 minutes too long; a mini-storyline featuring an obvious, ongoing semantics debate between a priest and an intellectual in the village only highlights themes that are already highlighted in garishly bright colors. It wouldn’t be a Zwick project though if there weren’t characters shamelessly venerating his protagonists’ in the screenplay.

Still, ignore the guilt from the exploitation of the Holocaust and the movie works as a trifling entertainment due to Daniel Craig’s muscular performance as the savior Tuvia. The star actually anchors the film and makes it worth watching. Freed from the elegance of James Bond, he’s basically Rambo in a bomber jacket astride a white horse, grittily barking orders and squinting against the recoil of his machine gun. Instead of avenging his lover’s death as in Casino Royale, he’s single-handedly doling out vengeance for genocide. One character intones that Tuvia Bielski was sent by God to restore faith, and gosh darnit, if there was ever an action hero to be sent to us by He Himself, it would be Craig. With an effortless sense of authority and confident leadership on full display here, he’s more 007 here than he was in Quantum of Solace, making Defiance the Bond movie that should’ve been.

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