Anthropoid

Anthropoid

I don’t want to trouble you with all my minor job issues but writing movie reviews for a spoiler-wary audience can sometimes be hard. This is one of those times. “Anthropoid,” written and directed by Sean Ellis, is not, in fact, a sci-fi thriller called “Predator” (though the title may suggest otherwise to some), but a historical drama inspired as they say by true events.

The film unfolds in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in the early 1940s. As any student of World War II should know really, as anyone should know, though I won’t go there Czechoslovakia was handed over to Germany in 1939, giving Hitler an abundance of natural resources and industrial might that helped him wage war after conquering Poland and setting off the Second World Conflict. The S.S., needless to say, was pretty effective at quashing resistance among the occupied Czechs, but an exiled Czech government kept up its efforts, and late in 1941 it flew a plane from England and dropped parachutists outside Prague who were supposed to embark on an audacious mission that also turned out to be deeply divisive.

The film opens with two parachutists, Jan (Jamie Dornan) and Josef (Cillian Murphy). Josef cuts his foot badly on the way down and needs stitches. Among other things, they get sniffed out by a couple of quasi-quisling farm folk who nearly sell them out when they get to Prague and make their contacts in the remnants of the Czechoslovakian resistance they have to work with, many of whom are horrified by their mission: the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, engineer of the Final Solution and Hitler’s iron fist in crushing resistance, nicknamed “the Butcher of Prague.”

Local resistance leader Ladislav (Marcin Dorocinski) baulks; suitably avuncular cohort “Uncle” Hajsky (Toby Jones) counsels cooperation. They shack up with a local family, establish covers in part by romancing a couple of local women, start doing recon to determine the pattern of Heydrich’s comings and goings. So do these heroes pull it off? That’s part of the historical record so I won’t say; also who knows maybe it’s better if you go into this thing blank or semi-, anyway.

I found it frustrating myself. It is cast largely with British actors, which is fine but does not follow what I now consider the anachronistic convention of having them speak with their native accents; rather Ellis has them speaking English in heavy Czech or “Czech” accents I lack the ear to judge them as accurate or otherwise but all involved are dedicated and expert professionals which made me kind of yearn for anachronism as mentioned above because that would at least be consistent.

Also I didn’t like how it looked; shot in widescreen format, about 2.35 ratio if my eye is any good at telling such things anymore (big if), almost all handheld shots; a lot of the time it’s like looking at a very long wobbly rectangle, and the frequently abrupt cutting doesn’t help. The movie’s scenario also traffics in several clichés. There is at least one mistaken, overstated metaphor near the end.

That said, “Anthropoid” has one hell of a story to tell, a story that once again reminds us of a savagery that is not so far in humanity’s past that we need to stop being reminded of it. The movie’s final scene Nazi soldiers storming into the church where a scant number of resistance members are trapped is loud and implacable and vivid; it does not rise to the level of great filmmaking represented by Wajda’s “Kanal,” which, not to put too fine a point on it, everyone should see before or instead of this one, but it’ll do.

Watch Anthropoid For Free On Gomovies.