Filmology Rating: 2.75 out of 4

My knowledge of WWII history is sadly rather small.  Most of my knowledge actually seems to come from the movies with films like: Saving Private Ryan, The Monuments Men, Letters from Iwo Jima, and Valkyrie; which all have Hollywood magic in them.  Needless to say I need to brush up on my history lessons but I still went into Anthropoid enthusiastically.  The film had two selling points: Cillian Murphy and director Sean Ellis.  Murphy won me with his performance in 2005’s Batman Begins, to the point where I will see any movie that comes out just because he is in the film.  Earlier this year I saw a film called Cashback, which I saw because it starred Sean Biggerstaff, who played Oliver Wood in the Harry Potter series, but I came out wanting to see more from the director Sean Ellis.  Ellis had a unique dreamlike style that he brought to the film, so I was interested to see what he could so with a WWII period film.  My hopes sadly drifted away rather quickly.

December 1941: Adolf Hitler and his Nazi forces are taking over Europe leaving death in their wake.  Secret missions are set into place to assassinate members of the Nazi party to bring the party to it’s knees.  One such mission is Operation: Anthropoid, which will be carried out by Jozef Gabcik, played by Cillian Murphy, and Jan Kubis, played by Jamie Dornan, who plan to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, who is third in line of the Nazi party.  The two Czechoslovakian soldiers find some allies who will help them with their quest but they also face betrayal at every turn.  

The first hour of this film is filled with heavy accents that it takes a while for my American ear to adjust to and the film dumps a ton of exposition on the audience, and if you aren’t a history aficionado it might take you some time to figure out what is going on in the film.  Once you do figure out who all the players are, like Jan Zelenka-Hajsky, played by Toby Jones, and Marie Kovarnikova, played by Charlotte Le Bon, you begin to question when anything in the film will actually happen.  The film becomes incredibly dry.  While you are getting good performances from Murphy and Dornan, I’m happy to say that he can act and that he is not the piece of wood that he was in Fifty Shades of Grey, that doesn’t help that nothing overly happens for the first half of this film.  

Once the assassination attempt occurs, the film speeds into an edge of your seat thriller.  The stakes couldn’t get any higher in the film with the amount of violence you see occurring.  Jozef and Jan already had only a handful of people they could trust and after the assassination attempt a manhunt was out for the two and anyone involved with them.  Events explode at a church where an impressive shootout takes place that would rival any scene from Taxi Driver or Scarface.  The tension during the final scenes of the movie is incredible, just hearing a pin drop in my theatre would have led the audience to yell for help.  While the cinematography for most of the film, done by the film’s director, is rather bland and seems to never be able to hold a steady shot, it seems to all have a sense of great focus during the shootout.  The camera will never cut away from the violence on the screen and you get to see every shot fired with our heroes defying all odds with trying to hold the church.

Anthropoid is a well made film, I cannot take away anything from the vision that Sean Ellis brought to the silver screen.  The film is sadly not friendly to those who aren’t familiar with history or have an ear for other languages.  Those two factors made the first half of this film a drag to watch and while that is my fault as an audience member that I’m not keen on heavy accents, I still think the film could have shown its exposition in a better way.  The second half of the film is worth watching and is easily one of the best shootouts in recent memory.  Sadly the film has a running time of two hours and to only recommend less than an hour of the film seems to be misplaced, but if you are in the mood for a slow burn thriller then this film is for you.

Rating: Rent It

-Jonny G