Black Book (2007)

Don't listen to the negative reviews

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

A period piece that draws you in despite some questionable plot arcs and convenient gaps in judgment amongst characters. That aside, this is a tense pic that has its hands deep in the oil wells of reality, pumping away to generate tension, excitement, confrontation and some timely duets by the main architect of the Netherlands gestapo despite not being it's head. there are both sympathetic scenes and exaggerated action and rolled up in hard to believe plot where the obvious is overlooked.Mind you, I believe that was the point the director was attempting to make about the reality of the time. Flashes on our starlets breast and bush did nothing to add to either element, if only to add brashness to our character, but to the detriment of suspense of disbelief. Not that sex wasn't used by both sides to get what they wanted or needed, but it was pedaled more than bought and that's a bit hard to swallow. The acting is above par but definitely mixed all along, confusing this viewer and adding to the overall thought that the high cost film was spiraling and had to wrap up before these inconsistencies could grow further.

This is a very good movie where characters are crossed by different determinations. During the second world war, we used to see some key groups in interaction: Allies countries, Resistance groups and German troops. Most of the second war films present these groups with fixed roles and expected behaviors. This film screenplay keeps us hunting who are the traitor of dutch resistance. At the same time, the main actress plays a resistance's spy who fell in love by a German captain. Beyond that, a German lieutenant is a robbery scheme chief that steals the money and belongings of Jewish upper-class people who pays to leave Netherlands. The main characters are shaped in a complex way grabbing the attention til the end. In short, a clever second world war film.

Before he dazzled Hollywood with his blood-soaked satires Robocop (1987) and Starship Troopers (1997) - and made us cringe with Basic Instinct (1992) and Showgirls (1995) - director Paul Verhoeven made Soldier of Orange (1977) in his native Netherlands, a film about the Dutch resistance movement during World War II which starred Rutgher Hauer. Almost thirty years later, and only six years since Hollow Man (2000) seemed to drain him of his creativity, Verhoeven returned to his homeland to make Zwartboek (Black Book), and to again highlight his country's heroic struggle during the Nazi occupation.In 1944, Dutch Jew Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten), a singer living in Berlin before the war, hides from the Nazi regime in the war-torn Netherlands. When the farmhouse she was hiding in is destroyed by the Americans, she is forced to flee, reuniting with her family before setting off by boat to the safer south. However, the boat is ambushed by the Nazis and Rachel narrowly escapes with her life, watching her entire family murdered in the process. Lost and alone, she decides to join the resistance in The Hague, where her many talents are put to good use. A chance meeting on a train leads her to charming the socks off high-ranking Nazi officer Ludwig Muntze (Sebastian Koch), so Rachel, under the guise of Ellis de Vries, is given the task of seducing him.World War II movies seem to be made with one of two intentions. One is to delve into the human soul and explore the horrors of battle, and the other is to simply entertain. Verhoeven's movie seems to lie somewhere in between, and the results are intriguing to say the least. Too often does the drama get interrupted by an unnecessary gun battle or explosion for the film to be taken too seriously, but, even at 145 minutes, Black Book is never in danger of dragging. It also never misses an opportunity to get van Houten in the nude, but to anyone familiar with the work of Paul Verhoeven, this will come as no surprise. While the actress now most famous as Melisandre the Red Priestess in Game of Thrones is staggeringly beautiful, her constant clothes-shedding hardly serves the plot or her character.In fact, Black Book asks a hell of a lot of van Houten, who is forced to don a number of faces and personalities as her character digs herself deeper into the role of secret agent and uncovers betrayals and secret plots at every turn. She handles it exceptionally well, and van Houten really should have gone on to be a A-lister after this. She has a sparkling chemistry with Koch, who is also very good as the man on the side facing defeat, hoping to agree a truce with the resistance to avoid more bloodshed. It's a handsomely shot film all round, made all the more staggering that this was conceived on such a modest budget, and it's clear that Verhoeven was out to make a movie he could be proud of. While his familiar exploitative approach prevents it from being great, Black Book is never boring and is peppered with enough grey characters (Verhoeven certainly doesn't white-wash the portrayal of his fellow Dutch) to keep the twists and turns coming until the very end.

This movie has everything!!! I was disappointed at the end because I didn't see Hitler fly into Paris on a Zeppelin balloon, jump on a bicycle and win the Tour de France, bribing the officials with stolen jewels from murdered Jews. But other than that, it simply has everything. Every single plot twist ever shown on the screen before, or to be found in pulp fiction smut magazines of the Forties. Naked sexy chicks? Got it. Mean Nazis whipping and having sex with said naked sexy chicks? Got it. Nazis shooting double-crossed innocents? Yup, got that, times three or four! I must correct other reviewers who seem to think this movie was based on fact. The titles actually say that it was inspired by true events. It was also inspired by the cigarettes they smoke in Holland that are not legally available elsewhere. I will give the writers some credit – there actually was a second world war, but that's about as far as the movie parallels reality.There are, in point of fact, about twenty betrayals and double-crosses in the plot, and a few false double-crosses where the lead character is thought to be a double-crosser but isn't really and she must prove her innocence before she can be killed. So on that score, this film wins on sheer volume and repetition of a plot mechanism. It becomes somewhat difficult to bear when we see Canadian soldiers hand out rifles to captured Germans after the war so they can shoot one of their own, a gentle, kind-hearted, sweetheart of a man who's in charge of the Gestapo and secretly saving the lives of guilty resistance fighters.The film also can win the Most Implausible Coincidences award for all the incidents that it uses to move a sluggish plot forward. For instance, how did the evil Dutch doctor (muahahaha) know that our intrepid Jewish heroine would convulse in uncontrollable grief upon hearing of the death of her Gestapo-boss lover? So that he could inject her with a 'sedative'. (muahahaha!!!) And why did the after-war prisoners (collaborators) haul up a cauldron of sewage twenty feet into the air? Is that what you do with sewage? Haul it up in the air? Just so it could be poured by the gang of haters onto our heroine? Did they know she'd be there? The worst of the implausible events is when the resistance fighters try to kidnap a double-crosser who leads Jews to their deaths in order to steal their wealth. The evil-doer (muahahaha) puts up a struggle and gets the upper hand, and a religious zealot has the only working gun, but he can't shoot because he'd be taking a life. The heroine is being strangled to death but the Christian can't kill to save her. The villain calls her a 'damn' whore and the Christian is so overcome with anger at the swearing that he is now able to start shooting the evil swearing man. He fills him with bullets and his friends have to pull him away from shooting more, not for choking a woman mind you, but for blaspheming. Only gold leaf can be stretched this far, but credulity, mmmm, not so much.Here is some truth about Holland's contribution to the war. It had a popular Nazi party. It fielded more than 25,000 soldiers to fight along side the Germans in Dutch SS divisions on the Russian front. This film about intense underground warfare, a complete myth, is nothing more than an attempt to firmly lock the closets, paper over the wall, and hide the skeletons of a not-so-glorious past. That can be the only explanation why such a fantasy could receive government funding. Blackbook is a brilliant example of inept writing, re-using plot twists and double-crosses, sex and violence ad nauseum, not until the story had come to a logical end, but until the funding ran out. Unfortunately, it also succeeds in draining one's patience, and I apologize to the actors. It must have required extreme professionalism to give top notch performances without bursting into laughter after each take, and to their credit they did not.