You won't be disappointed!

Too much of everything

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Year 1941; World War-II at its height. The Nazis invaded Belarus and swept entire towns of Jews - liquidating and deporting many to concentration camps. "Freedom" was reduced to shreds; yet to reattain, it all began with the act of Defiance Recently orphaned in the carnage, the four Beilski brothers took refuge in the forests; only to know that hundreds like them, were scattered all over. The eldest two - Tuvia and Zus - soon realised that a more concrete settlement would be needed, citing the increasing numbers of their exiles. Makeshift huts came up first, followed by those sneaky "food missions". Thus, those stranded ones grew into an armed brigade ("otriad"). A "communally-functioning-camp", individuals worked for the survival of all while living with the strict rationing in food, medicines, clothes, and even reproduction. Their lives constantly at threat of being caught or killed-in-action, didn't stop the Beilski Otriad to join the resistant Soviet Red Army against the Third Reich.When Jews were considered best at surrendering and dying, that frail clique resisted by living. Moses didn't, but they themselves hand- in-hand parted their waters, with "courage as their ultimate weapon".Good casting choices of Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and the ensemble, to enact a lesser known sequence of events in this biographical-war-drama by Edward Zwick ("Blood Diamonds"), amidst his signature action-choreography and Oscar nominated civil-scoring by James Newton Howard ("The Hunger Games") makes it a fair watch for anyone interested in a different side of history. Rating - 7/10.

Is Edward Zwick the dullest filmmaker in America? He's certainly one of the most infuriating--time and again discovering fascinating stories buried in the corners of history, only to completely botch their revelation. Zwick movies invariably balloon into lumbering white elephants, embalmed in the icky molasses of awards-season prestige and corny Hollywood contrivances.The Last Samurai could've been an absorbing take on ancient tradition colliding with a modern world, but instead devolved into a lovingly photographed tribute to the wind blowing through Tom Cruise's hair in slow motion.Blood Diamond had all the ingredients of a gripping, topical thriller, but instead played out as a morbid procession of Oscar clips, climaxing with the preposterous sight of a gutshot Leonardo DiCaprio making not one but two weepy farewell phone calls while in the middle of a gunfight.There's a specific sort of turgidness to an Edward Zwick film, an oatmeal blandness evident since his feature debut, 23 years ago, when he distorted David Mamet's scathing play Sexual Perversity in Chicago into a sitcom-like vehicle for Rob Lowe and Demi Moore called About Last Night ...There's obviously no material that this man can't flatten with his tedious middlebrow sensibility.Zwick does it again with Defiance, making a cheesy mess out of the captivating, little-known tale of the Bielski otriad. In 1941, four hard-drinking, rough-hewn criminal brothers headed deep into the Belarusian forest, building a kibbutz where they and fellow Jews could hide from Hitler's goons and wait out the war. The Bielski brothers saved hundreds of lives, but these wondrous facts don't provide enough nobility for Zwick. This is such a damned good story, he's determined to oversell it.Daniel Craig--the blonde-haired, blue-eyed 007 who apparently became an honorary Jew after Stephen Spielberg cast him in Munich--stars as Tuvia Bielski, and we can tell right away he's supposed to be the hero because he makes gaseous proclamations from atop a white horse, his every utterance underscored by a martial bleat from of composer James Newton Howard's trumpets. The rest of the people in the movie are always seen gazing upward at him in slackjawed awe.Well, everybody except for Zus, Tuvia's hot-headed little brother, played with a swarthy intensity by Liev Schreiber. Zus just wants to kill as many Germans as he can, but Tuvia insists that "living will be our revenge." These two have many tiresome parable-inflected arguments that play like bad knockoffs of the Talmudic debates Tony Kushner wrote for Munich.Meanwhile, the third brother, Asael (Jamie Bell), sheepishly stands off to the side, presumably wondering the same thing as the audience: What casting director in their right mind thought James Bond, Liev Schreiber and Billy Elliot could pass for brothers? Shot by cinematographer Eduardo Serra in that same digitally tweaked, washed-out color palate that's become the cliché for WWII movies since Saving Private Ryan, Defiance ignores what's most interesting about its own story in favor of a ton of stock scenes we've already seen; there are no surprises here. When the saintly elderly Hasidic comic abruptly coughs mid-quip, everybody knows what's going to happen to him within the next 10 minutes. There's even a gooey romance between Craig and Alexa Davalos, which arrives out of left field and seems to be motivated by a producer's decree that every big-budget Hollywood film must have a romance in there somewhere.Still hungry for vengeance, Schreiber's Zus takes off to fight with the Russians. Zwick and his co-screenwriter Clayton Frohman take a couple of jabs at the irony of Jews enlisting alongside a bunch of virulent Anti-Semites, but as is the case with any potentially interesting idea in Defiance, this one takes a back seat to the plot mechanics of a risibly inauthentic rescue sequence.By the time estranged brother Zus rides in like Han Solo to save Moses Skywalker's butt at the exact moment when things look hopeless, Zwick's done it again. He's made a true story feel awfully false.

Defiance is a well meaning but bloated film that wants to depicts Jews more than just as passive victims in eastern Europe during World War 2.Based on true facts of the Bielski brothers, Tuvia Bielski (Daniel Craig) is almost Moses like as he leads a band of Jews in the forest of Belarus to survival. He take in fleeing Jews, builds a society with rules of fairness so they do not live like animals. Fight any advancing militia and stave off hunger and disease.His quick tempered brother Zus (Liev Schreiber) wants to take the fight to the Nazis and the collaborators and has little time to help fleeing Jews to survive. He sides with the Russians even though he knows that they too are anti semites.Director Edward Zwick has to keep this two narrative strands going but the film is too disjointed and trite. The third brother Asael (Jamie Bell) is wasted as the one who has choose between his brothers and falls in love with one of the beautiful girls in the woods which causes friction with a rival who throws a challenge to Tuvia's authority.The film is hackneyed, dreary and not even that interesting. The actors speak Russian and then shift to English with heavy accents. The film needed a lightness of touch and maybe even some humour to counterbalance the grimness.

What with all the stories told from every faction of WWII and how everybody trounced those pesky Nazi Germans, things can get a bit formulaic! Defiance is a war era drama that takes a different stance, in fact it takes two; standing with one foot in the campgrounds of the Russian Partisans and the other in the camps of the Jews who dared to escape into the woods of Belorussia and Poland to survive the Holocaust.It sports some finely crafted drama, though not perfect. It just does the best with what it has and thankfully it has authenticity and great acting on its side, despite some shortcomings and incidences of overstepping the mark.Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber play the two older brothers of a slain Jewish Belorussian family who flee with their younger siblings into the woods, chased not only by Nazis but the police forces of their own communities who have sided with the enemy.One brother goes on to lead the growing number of escaping Jews while the other - ostracised after rising tensions - joins the Partisans.The story is sometimes sporadic in its delivery of drama and incidence, meaning that one theme is sometimes forgotten for the sake of a bit of action. Don't get me wrong, some of the action is superbly done, but I felt that there were some rushed scenes.While all very well executed, I feel that Defiance suffered an occasional conflict in direction and style, but most viewers might not even notice this.Craig and Schreiber's Russian is spot on and at times even seems playfully competitive, which adds much needed chemistry to such an ambitious tale of family. Jamie Bell is also on form.Overall a fine effort, even though I felt it might actually have had more impact were it half an hour shorter.