Defianceworks well enough as an against-all-odds war drama, writes Donald Clarke

ED ZWICK, the workmanlike director of such illustrated lectures as Gloryand Blood Diamond, has made a film about the Jewish resistance to the Nazis in Belarus. As you might expect, he asks us to swallow a great deal of Grade-A Hollywood cheese.

A key scene finds Daniel Craig - playing one of four heroic brothers - snuggling up to his girlfriend in a rough hut deep in a snowy forest. A warm, reddish glow (sun? fire?) illuminates the clean, naked bodies and the neat yellow wood. It's like a scene from a Bond film, but, crucially, not one starring Daniel Craig. Pierce Dalton-Moore would be quite at home in this cosy shag- lodge.

Everyone in Defiancesports lovely teeth. The intellectuals have round glasses, the heroes wear cosmetically distressed leather jackets, the collaborators are all overweight. So blatant are the genuflections to the mainstream that one half-expects the film to end with a massed song-and-dance number. (Indeed, that might have been less clunky than the gung-ho finale we are offered.)

And yet Defiancejust about works. It helps that Zwick has a fine cast on hand and an interesting story to tell.

In 1941, Tuvia Bielski (played by Craig), a hard-drinking, uncompromising woodsman, led several hundred fellow Jews into the Belarusian woods and taught them how to forage and fight. Meanwhile, his brother Zus (Liev Schreiber) joined forces with the Russian army and took the battle directly to the Germans.

Defianceis, to be fair, no more unrealistic than a hundred classic westerns from Hollywood's golden years. Making no serious claims for verisimilitude, it offers any number of agreeably noisy battle sequences and tells its story in a lucid, uncomplicated fashion.

If you want to learn the unadorned facts then wait for the documentary that will, no doubt, accompany the DVD release. If you want a properly searing depiction of the war in Belarus, seek out Elem Klimov's untouchable Come and See. There is still room for a Boys Own take on history, and Defiancemeets the criterion quite nicely.

Still, given recent events in Gaza, it's hard not to wince at the scene in which a cowed peasant, surprised by the Bielskis' bellicosity, declares: "Jews do not fight." There's one myth that no longer requires deflation.

***
Directed by Ed Zwick. Starring Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, Jamie Bell, Alexa Davalos, Allan Corduner, Mark Feuerstein 15A cert, gen release, 137 min