Kenneth Branagh takes Poirot to Venice

 Kenneth Branagh continues his Agatha Christie preoccupation with A Haunting in Venice, his third in a series of films based on Christie novels. As is the case with much of Christie's work, Haunting  delays its big revelation until the end, allowing ace detective Hercule Poirot finally to disclose whodunit. 

  I won't do that with this review. Here's my take: Haunting is an adequate -- though hardly exhilarating -- thriller seasoned by supernatural suggestion that goes against the ultra-rational Poitrot grain.

  As a director, Branagh, who also plays Poirot, takes advantage of otherworldly possibilities, trying for a few jolts and a large helping of eeriness. But the film doesn't register as a superior slice of horror, if that's what Branagh had in mind.

    Christie purists will note that Branagh has based his film on the author's novel, Hallowe'en Party, and shifted its location from England to Italy. By confining most of the tale to the creepy confines of an old  palazzo, Branagh misses an opportunity. The labyrinthian alleys and byways of Venice could have augmented the movie's mystery and terror.

    The story begins in 1947 when Ariadne Oliver, a mystery writer played by Tina Fey, invites Poirot to a Halloween party. She wants the great sleuth to expose a psychic (Michelle Yeoh) who claims to communicate with the dead, one of whom happened to be the daughter of the palazzo's owner (Kelly Reilly). The girl, we learn, entered the realm of the departed after committing suicide.

    Not surprisingly, the mystery doesn't end when Poirot discover that the psychic is a fraud. The plot contrives to allow Poirot to do what he always does: hunt a killer. 

    The visual atmosphere ranges from dim to dark and Branagh also employs a charged angle about the palazzo's past. At one time, the place housed orphans who were abandoned to die. Their ghosts are said to have haunted the place ever since. 

    The supporting cast of characters -- or more precisely suspects  -- includes a visiting American (Kyle Allen), a psychologically damaged physician (Jamie Dornan), his precocious son (Jude Hill) and others who expand the list of red herrings.

     We're meant to wonder whether a stream of mysterious occurrences will shatter Poirot's commitment to reason, causing him to rethink his rejection of otherworldly claims. Let's just say that Poirot's skepticism, forged by many murder investigations, has deep roots.

      Earlier in this review, I called Haunting adequate,  hardly a ringing endorsement for a whodunit that generates too little concern about who  committed the dastardly deed.

     It's not so much that we figure things out early on; it's that we're not given enough reason to immerse in the gloomy game Poirot must play.

     

    

A boy's life during "The Troubles"

 

   In 1969, Protestants and Catholics were at one another's throats in the streets of Belfast, Northern Ireland. Bombs ripped through urban neighborhoods, people were beaten, and an atmosphere of fear and rage prevailed. 

   Despite the turmoil, normal life never entirely disappeared. Kids played on their blocks, and not every Belfast Protestant spewed hatred for Catholics who wanted Northern Ireland to sever ties with Great Britain.

    Kenneth Branagh wrote and directed Belfast, a movie that captures a slice of life during the terrible times when Branagh was a kid. Branagh, who also wrote the screenplay, shows us Belfast through the eyes of nine-year-old Buddy (Jude Hill), a boy whose dad (Jamie Dornan) commutes to construction jobs in England. Buddy's mom (Caitriona Balfe) holds things together in Belfast, the city the family regards as home.

   Grandma (Judi Dench) and Grandpa (Ciaran Hinds) are close at hand and Buddy movies easily between both households. His older brother (Lewis McAskie) isn't seen quite as much. 

    Branagh makes some interesting stylistic decisions, the most important being to film mostly in black-and-white, interrupting with color for scenes in which the family attends movies. 

    In the theater, a world of color opens for the family as they watch films such as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and One Million Years BC, not exactly high art but welcome escapes from daily tensions. 

    High Noon plays on TV, a moral drama that mirrors some of the struggles faced by Dornan's Pa.

    Van Morrison, who hails from Northern Ireland, provides a score that fits the proceedings and, although the movie doesn't shrink from violence, it often adopts the dreamy tone of events seen through a filter of memory and longing. 

   Street violence juxtaposes with the tenderness of family life and Buddy’s youthful innocence. He has a crush on a fellow student, for example, presenting her with flowers, a touching gesture of unashamed love.

    It's not surprising that Buddy has no idea how to react to the events around him. When rioters crash into a local supermarket, he grabs a box of detergent and takes it home to his mother. 

    As someone who regards Protestants and Catholics as equals, Dornan's Pa faces pressure from local toughs who want him to join a neighborhood gang that's taking up arms against Catholics. Pa knows that it won't be long before the violent Protestant partisans take revenge on him for refusing to fight.

     He’s involved in a tug of war with his wife, who’s reluctant to leave the only home she has known. 

    The episodic nature of the movie wears a bit thin, but overall, Belfast paints a telling picture of a family forced to decide whether to endure devastating turmoil or pull up roots.

     In a better world, they never would have had to make such a choice.

    

A hit-and-miss hunk of silliness

    Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo team in a movie that's vying for a dubious title: the most ridiculous movie ever made.

    Now, there's nothing wrong with ridiculousness and when a movie opts for so much unabashed silliness, we're obliged to give it a whirl, especially with the talented and often funny Wiig as one of the principals. Remember, too, Wiig and Mumolo wrote the screenplay for Bridesmaids.

    But as silly as Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar can be, it's only mildly amusing with one great gag involving culottes, women's pants that the movie considers to be a major fashion boo-boo.

    Wiig and Mumolo play a couple of Nebraska women who've lost their husbands, one to divorce, the other to death. After their jobs at a  furniture store vanish, this duo is expelled from the local Talking Club -- a preposterous small gathering of women with nothing to say. 

    What the hell? It's time for an adventure.

    So it's off to Florida, where Barb and Star become caught up in a plot that's being orchestrated by a woman with the whitest complexion in the western world. The chalky white Dr. Lady (also Wiig)-- wants to kill off the entire town of Vista Del Mar because of slights she suffered as a child.

  An Asian boy named YoYo (Reyn Doi) and a stooge who expects to marry Dr. Lady (Jamie Dornan) are part of  a plan to kill everyone in Vista Del Mar during the town's festive shrimp celebration.

   Once in Florida, Barb (Mumolo) and Star (Wiig) lose their buddy mojos and begin competing for the affections of Dornan's Edgar.

   Director Josh Greenbaum does his best to turn Vista Del Mar into a pastel paradise, a riot of blues and pinks punctuated by occasional musical numbers. 

    There are chuckles. The worst kind of tourists, Barb and Star are unable to resist shopping for the trashiest tchotchkes. Before an accommodations upgrade, Barb & Star check into a ramshackle motel where the desk clerk asks if they will require towels. Wiig, Mumolo, and Dornan are sandwiched into an off-color sight gag, and an occasional line reveals how bereft of awareness, the two can be.

    "A person's face says a lot about how they look,'' says Star, a supposed example of her uncanny wisdom.

     If a movie is going to be this outlandish, it better do it with abandon and without shame. A total commitment to silliness might be Barb & Star's saving grace. Full of raunch, the movie may not always work but it's far too preposterous to hate.

    Still, a step back suggests that Wiig and Mumolo came up with two cluelessly funny characters who may not be worth an entire movie, particularly one with a climax involving swarms of deadly mosquitos and a kid in a submarine.

A whimsical (heaven help us) romcom

 

     Writer/director John Patrick Shanley's new movie -- Wild Mountain Thyme -- takes place in Ireland where Emily Blunt and Jamie Dornan star as a couple of farmers who've known each other all their lives. 

     Their families own adjacent farms, but Blunt's mother (Dearbhla Molloy) refuses to sell a strip of land to Dornan's father Tony (Christopher Walken). 

  Although this squabble over land creates mild tension, the bulk of the movie involves the halting relationship between Blunt's Rosemary and Dornan's Anthony. 

    The savvy Rosemary understands that they're supposed to be together. Preternatural shyness keeps Anthony from popping the question. 

    Shanley sets us up for a flavorful romcom, but whimsy, romance, and occasional splashes of rue aren't enough to give this adaptation of a Shanley stage play (Outside Mullingar) new life. 

   Trailers for Wild Mountain Thyme riled the Irish press. The movie was mocked for cliched Irish accents that seemed tailored for characters who felt as if they'd been drawn from fantasy. 

    Fair enough and casting Walken as an Irish father with a highly variable accent doesn't help.

    American audiences, who may not be quite so unhinged by the accents, will find an otherwise slender movie in which Blunt gives the stand-out performance.

     Frank and cynical, Rosemary knows what she wants. She doesn't need to be romanced. She's eager to arrive at the destination. Reticent but not lacking in self-insight, Dornan's Anthony doesn't make for the most interesting counterpoint to Rosemary's determination.

     The arrival of an American cousin (a bland Jon Hamm) threatens the already tenuous relationship between Rosemary and Anthony.     

    Scenes that are intended to be funny (Anthony practicing his proposal speech by kneeling before a donkey) don't quite work  and Shanley's effort to preserve the play's darker currents don't really pay off. Rain soaks several scenes and an early encounter involving Walken and Molloy is steeped in talk of death.

     Shanley gives the characters a wary sense of skepticism, but  for all its trying, Wild Mountain Thyme doesn't stir the heart. 

     Shanley, who wrote and directed Doubt (2008), also wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for Moonstruck (1987), a charmer that was directed by Norman Jewison. Those were two strong movies, but this time, attempts at quirky authenticity feel strained.

     Weird, no? In Wild Mountain Thyme, what must have been intended as idiosyncratic and flavorful too often feels stereotypical.

      

Drugs, time travel and fatigued paramedics

 

    Time travel movies may not have dime-a-dozen familiarity, but they're not exactly novel either. That means that directors who venture into this territory must do so with an awareness that they need to come up with something that feels fresh. 

    Directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who directed the tantalizing Endless, take an unusual approach in Synchronic, a movie with a time-travel twist. They tell a story that doesn't appear to be about time travel at all -- at last initially.

   Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan portray two New Orleans paramedics, best friends who are bombarded by constant drug-overdose calls, so much so that Synchronic looks like another foray into the world of drugs and despair but it's not quite that either.

   Synchronic, by the way, is a powerful pill that opens those who swallow it to seven minutes of time travel that takes place from the exact spot where the drug has been taken. Travelers play a game of time-travel roulette: They can't control the period in which they land.

  Synchronic puts plenty on its plate: friendship, the vanished daughter on Dornan's character, a crumbling marriage, a terminal disease from which Mackie's character suffers and travel to various moments in history -- the Ice Age to the time of the Conquistadors among them.

   As the movie's principal time-traveler, Mackie's Steve faces all manner of danger in his seven-minute forays into alternate realities, the idea being that past, present and future actually are concurrent. References to Einstein and physics are made, but the movie hardly qualifies as an intellectual exercise.

   The directors can't entirely fuse the movie's diverse elements and not everything about Synchronic works. For me, though, Mackie's complex character keeps the movie on track. Dornan holds his own, as well, and Synchronic nudges its way onto the plus side of the sci-fi ledger.

Bob's Cinema Diary 4/17/20 -- The Booksellers and Endings, Beginnings

The Booksellers

The documentary Booksellers takes us into the world of antiquarian book dealing, a diminishing trade populated by people devoted to the hunt for books, as well as to the care and nurturing of their many collections of volumes. Although the movie eventually veers into the world of ephemera (paper collectibles such as obscure, at least to me, HipHop magazines) it's best when it sticks to the world of book collecting. D.W. Young directs a loosely focused introduction to a vanishing world that benefits mightily from the presence of Fran Lebowitz, a collector who tells a story about a now-vanished "used" bookstore where the owners were entirely indifferent to anything as mundane as a customer. We also hear from Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief), an author who talks about cataloging her own collection of notebooks and research material. As readers increasingly turn to digital books, it's refreshing, nostalgic and a little sad to contemplate the day when the printed book becomes a high-priced curiosity. Maybe the best thing about The Booksellers involves the way it makes us feel. You may not want to shell out a fortune for a first edition of Melville's Moby Dick but you may find yourself looking for an easy chair where you can take a hardback off your shelf and spend the afternoon turning its pages.

Endings/Beginnings

The always watchable Shailene Woodley appears in nearly every frame of director Drake Doremus' Endings/Beginnings, a movie of increasingly diminishing rewards. Woodley portrays Daphne, a 30-something woman facing a dilemma. Daphne simultaneously falls for two men who happen to be friends: Jamie Dornan's Jack and Sebastian Stan's Frank. The movie begins when Daphne, who recently separated from her boyfriend, moves in with her sister (Lindsay Sloane). Daphne's mom (Wendie Malick), we soon learn, has had her own trouble with men. Unable to find employment in the non-profit art world, Daphne seems to float through life, finding herself attracted to both Jack, a novelist, and Frank, a free spirit who gets by on charm. An underexplored incident in the past helped create Daphne's lack of direction but doesn't add much by way of interest. Loose and relaxed in its approach, the movie creates the expectation that something memorable eventually will happen: It doesn't, not really. Woodley holds the screen but her character doesn't seem particularly deep. Don't blame Woodley or any of the other actors. Doremus and co-screenwriter Jardine Libaire's haven't created characters intriguing enough to keep the movie humming for all of its 110 minutes. Oh, and like just about everyone else in the movie, Woodley is asked to smoke a lot. Hope they all got hazardous duty pay.

She looked into the eye of war

Rosamund Pike portrays a journalist who couldn't say no to war.

A Private War tells the real-life story of Marie Colvin's life at work. Of course, a day’s work for Colvin, an award-winning war correspondent, upsets any notion of jobs as tedious, office-bound activities. Colvin made her living reporting from some of the world's worst war zones. She lost her left eye as the result of an explosion in Sri Lanka and ultimately died in Homs, Syria.

Colvin's great achievement in Homs was to put the world on notice that Syria’s embattled president, Bashar al-Assad, was not only bombing military targets but also was obliterating the city’s civilian population. Telling that story cost Colvin her life.

Directed by Matthew Heineman, previously known for documentaries, Private War quickly lays out the rationale for Colvin’s willingness to put herself in harm’s way. She argues that the world must know about the suffering bred by war. It must hear the stories of those who suffer.

Private War will be hailed for Rosamund Pike’s portrayal of Colvin, a skilled and confident reporter who couldn't escape war-born demons in the form of PTSD and alcoholism, two conditions she was unwilling to acknowledge.

Colvin wrote for the British Sunday Times but grew up in Long Island. Pike, who’s British, masters an American accent. More importantly, she captures Colvin’s no-nonsense approach to her job and her possibly self-destructive refusal to opt for safer forms of journalism even after she was forced to wear an eye patch from her Sri Lanka wounds.

At a party in London, a friend (Nikki Amuka-Bird) suggests that Colvin seek help. She can’t break through Colvin's addictive cycle: war reporting followed by troubled respites in London.

Colvin's editor (Tom Hollander) doesn't push her to take a desk job. She's too good at what she does. He jokes about her writing for the gardening section as if the only forms of journalism were those involving extreme danger and those relegated to the sleepy nether regions of feature sections.

Heineman structures the film as a series of harrowing war tours interrupted by glimpses of Pike’s life away from the battles she covered. He includes an underdeveloped relationship with Tony Shaw (Stanley Tucci), a wealthy businessman who says he’s interested in sexual adventures rather than one-night stands.

Colvin maintains her strongest relationship with a freelance war photographer played by Jamie Dornan, bearded and close to unrecognizable after his work in the Fifty Shades of Grey movies. Photographer and reporter are bonded by the hardships they endure as a team.

Always eager to set her own path (she sneered at embedded journalists), Colvin knew how to stay a step ahead of other reporters as she worked in ravaged countries such as Iraq and Syria. In Libya, she interviewed Gaddafi just before his fall. She was a go-to journalist when it came to war.

Heineman and his team put a great deal of effort into making authentically vivid scenes of battle chaos, civilian suffering and the obscene destruction of war.

Like Colvin, Heineman must have wanted to drive home the brutality of wars, particularly its impact on hapless civilians. Scenes of mayhem are luridly convincing -- if a bit numbing after a while.

A Private War certainly has its virtues, but there’s something a little off about the movie: Heineman has a point to make but not much story to tell: Without people such as Colvin, however flawed she might have been as a person, blood would be shed without outside scrutiny.

That's a powerful statement, but I wondered whether it might have made a more fitting tribute to Colvin to take one of her strong stories and turn it into a movie. What made Colvin great, I think, was that she had more interest in the stories she so compulsively told than in her self. So much so that she died telling them.

'Fifty Shades' reaches its end -- thankfully

Soft-core sex and soft-headed plotting make this chapter a bore.

Anastasia and Christian Grey are now married. Don't feel bad. I wasn't invited to the wedding, either.

But I did see some of the photos. In fact, Fifty Shades Freed, the third movie featuring the bondage-loving couple of E.L.James' best-selling trilogy, opens with Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan reprising their roles as Anastasia and Christian by exchanging vows.

There's dancing at a glamorous reception before the happy couple hops on a private jet and heads to Paris. Of course, no honeymoon would be complete without a set of handcuffs to spice things up in the bedroom of Christian's luxury yacht, another part of the honeymoon trip.

Much of Fifty Shades Freed's one-hour and 45-minute running time involves sex scenes staged in various expensive surroundings as the Greys learn to adjust to married life. He's still too possessive; she bristles a little at the loss of some of her independence.

Don't fret, though. The Greys' idea of kissing and making up may involve being strapped to a wall, but it seems to work for them.

In this gauzy, soft-core world, money is no object. Maybe that's why the Greys feel free to bore us with their inane lives and well-sculpted bodies, putting the latter on display in much the same way as the trendy furnishings of the Grey's apartment or the film's fashionable settings.

If there's a strategy here, it might have something to do with pleasing the eye and subduing the restless mind. Anastasia's bare breasts and Christian's exposed butt substitute for plot points as the movie leafs through one coffee-table image after another.

Director James Foley takes charge of the conclusion of the Fifty Shades trilogy, which strains to find something to do with its two protagonists by introducing thriller elements in the final going.

The first movie, which was directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, had the distinction of being better than anyone imagined it could be. The next two, both directed by Foley? Not so much.

You can tell a movie is running low on imaginative gas when it must work in a car chase, this one involving prominent display of Grey's spiffy Audi with Anastasia at the wheel.

Other characters appear, notably Anastasia's ex-boss (Eric Johnson) and one of her gal pals (Eloise Mumford). Rita Ora portrays Christian's sister. Marcia Gay Harden returns as Christian's mom.

None of these secondary characters matter because the movie runs them over as it pushes Anastasia and Christian toward conventional family life -- at least as it's lived in soft-headed fantasies that treat reality as if it were a disease no movie ever would want to catch.

Darker? A bit. Dumber? I'll say.

Fifty Shades Darker: A low-rent soap opera punctuated by a soft-core porn approach..

The first movie was better than expected. The second edition -- a soap opera punctuated with soft-core porn -- is precisely what I expected, a silly helping of romance which seems bound to make titillated audiences giggle.

Once again, Anastasia (Dakota Johnson) hooks up with Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan). Just in case she didn't learn enough about Christian's sadistic proclivities the first time around, Anastasia returns for a second helping.

Despite attracting the attention of her publishing company boss (Eric Johnson), she seems intent on testing the reformation that Christian claims to have undergone. He wants Anastasia more than he wants his S&M playthings -- up to a point. At least, he'll try to stay on track.

Hey, breaking habits isn't easy. Besides, what to do with all that kinky paraphernalia? Does Good Will accept nipple clips?

History aside, Christian seems a better bet than Anastasia's boss, who turns out to be a bit of a sleaze.

Anastasia doesn't seem to know what's obvious to viewers in the first five minutes. She loves this rich guy who has a special red room in his Seattle apartment. That's where he inflicts pain on women who -- ready for some psychology? -- represent the poor guy's crack addicted biological mother. She neglected him. He gets off on punishing others.

Christian's idea of commitment includes lots of oral sex and a semi-humorous bit involving small balls inserted in Anastasia's ... well .... you know. Which orifice did you guess? Still, we're supposed to believe he's trying to fight his baser impulses. He really wants his relationship with Anastasia to work, even though he can't entirely curb his possessiveness and jealousy.

Besides, Anastasia's into some of the more adventurous sex play. Turns out she likes a kink or two, so long as it doesn't tip into sadism.

The hapless supporting cast includes Rita Ora as Christian's sister Mia, and Marcia Gay Harden as Christian's adoptive mother. She hopes her son will find something resembling a normal life with Anastasia.

Kim Basinger shows up as Elena, the older woman who jealously guards what's left of her former relationship with Christian, who -- as I mentioned -- tries to behave himself.

Occasionally, another of Christian's former lovers (Bella Heathcote) -- a young woman gone creepy -- turns up to lend an air of mystery. A helicopter crash is inserted awkwardly into the proceedings.

Director James Foley takes over the helm, and does his best to give a high-gloss treatment to low-rent material.

For all its attempts at eroticism, the movie is aggressively uninteresting, a problem that's not helped by Dornan's lifeless performance and what seems like Anastasia's bubble-headed approach to everything.

Oh wait. I forgot. She's smart. She's read Austen and Bronte.

There's another Fifty Shades on tap, so if you're addicted to the E.L. James' stories, you'll have more chances to immerse yourself in the romantic falderal as Christian fights his worst impulses, the smitten Anastasia devotes herself to love, and dark forces threaten the couple's happiness.

Meanwhile, this edition of Fifty Shades Darker arrives in time for Valentine's Day, prompting only one question. Whatever happened to the simple, old-fashioned box of chocolates?

A fine movie from Italy and two lesser movies as a disappointing summer draws to a close

For the most part, this has been a summer of discontents, to borrow (badly, I suppose) from Shakespeare.

The pleasures we have found at the movies have been mostly on the fringes, so it's probably entirely appropriate that Labor Day weekend, regarded as the conclusion of summer ever since the days when politicians put their white shoes back in the closet for another year, follows suit.

A DIRECTOR GRAPPLES WITH CRISIS ON AND OFF SET

In Mia Madre, Italian actress Margherita Buy plays a woman with plenty on her plate. Her character -- also named Margherita -- is directing a movie, dealing with her aging mother's decline, trying to be a good mother to her teen-age daughter, and seeking a break from her relationship with a needy lover. She's also trying to coax a performance out of an egotistical American actor (a funny John Turturro) who shows up to play the part of a beleaguered factory owner in a movie about labor/management conflict. Director Nanni Moretti appears in the movie as Margherita's brother, a reassuring man who holds together even when others are falling apart. Moretti (Dear Diary, We Have a Pope and The Son) follows Margherita as she rushes between her movie set and the hospital where her once highly competent mother (Giulia Lazzarini) is slipping ever deeper into the fog of dementia. As if all this weren't enough for a single movie, Moretti includes flashbacks, fantasies, and, in what seems to be a case of piling on, a flood that forces Margherita out of her apartment. Perhaps directing a movie and trying to balance an emotionally taxing personal life aren't entirely different enterprises. Both require the ability to function in the midst of apparent chaos and both require belief in the illusion that circumstances can be controlled.

A STRESSED OUT SOLDIER FINDS A CHALLENGING NEW JOB

Director Alice Winocour (Augustine) succeeds mostly in frustrating us with Disorder, a portentous thriller about a traumatized French soldier (Matthias Schoenaerts) who lands a temporary job guarding the family of a Lebanese businessman (Percy Kemp). When the ostentatiously wealthy tycoon leaves on business trip, Schoenaerts' Vincent is left to fight a series of invaders who are connected to a murky, arms-related plot in which the businessman's wife (Diane Kruger) and her young son (Zaid Errougui-Demonsant) are targeted. Sensible behavior (leaving the gated mansion that's under attack, for example) too often gives way to atmospherics as Schoenaerts and Kruger struggle with the screenplay's insistent vagueness. To me, their efforts went for naught. Winocour teases us into involvement without giving Disorder a satisfying enough payoff.

IS HE ACCIDENT PRONE OR IS SOMETHING ELSE AFOOT?

The 9th Life of Louis Drax begins as if it's going to be a seriously intriguing drama about a nine-year-old boy who spends much of the movie in a coma after he falls off a cliff. Rather than an examination of how people cope with tragedy, The 9th Life begins raising doubts about whether Louis (Aiden Longworth) is accident prone or the victim of sustained abuse. As director Alexandre Aja moves through a variety of flashbacks, we meet Louis' angry stepfather (Aaron Paul), a neurologist (Jamie Dornan) who wants to help the boy, and the boy's mother (Sarah Gadon). Dornan's character believes that it's possible to carry on mind-melding communication with people in deep comas. Additional complications arise when Dornan's character, who's married, begins to fall for Gadon's character. Rather than building on its strong premise, Max Minghella's screenplay -- based on a 2004 novel by Liz Jensen -- devolves into a strained and unsatisfying thriller that's intent on leading us down one more muddled path.

A plot to kill a top Nazi

Anthropoid is not the latest horror movie to roll off the Hollywood assembly line -- at least not in any conventional way in which we use the word "horror." Rather, Anthropoid takes its title from a World War II code name for a Czech-conceived operation designed to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, one of the worst members of a Nazi hierarchy in which competition for the title was pretty stiff. Anthropoid doesn't entirely do justice to the story of a duo of Czech fighters (Jamie Dornan and Cillian Murphy) who parachute into their country to kill Heydrich, a.k.a., the Butcher of Prague. The two Czechs, who had been living in London, are housed with a local family, and begin to associate with a variety of members of the Czech resistance. Both young men develop relationships with women, one with the daughter of the family that's hiding them, the other with one of the daughter's friends. Most of the cast is British, which means much of the dialogue is delivered with accents. Director Sean Ellis stages the assassination long before the movie ends, which means that much of Anthropoid's second half deals with attempts by the characters to escape capture by the SS. Heydrich died shortly after the assassination attempt, and the Germans unleashed brutal reprisals on the Czech population. The story culminates with a lengthy gun battle in which German soldiers try to wipe out resistance members, who, by this time, are hiding in a church. If the battle feels interminable, that's probably what Ellis intended. This intensely depicted and appropriately exhausting bit of warfare brings the movie, which has its longueurs, to its sad conclusion, but decent and often restrained work from Dornan (as Jan Kubis) and Murphy (as Josef Gabcik) can't quite lift the movie out of its earlier doldrums. Anthropoid serves as a rudimentary introduction to a neglected World War II story, but it should have accomplished more.