A good movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since it has won the Golden Kalf of the best Dutch movie of the year, I was quite eaget to check it out. Well, even if it didn’t turn out be anything really ground-breaking, it was still a decent WWII drama. Above all, it was actually quite interesting that they gave such a different view on resistance fighting. Indeed, instead of the usual bombings, other sabotages or intel operations, they focused here on the guys who basically financed the whole thing in the Netherlands and I have to admit that it was actually some rather fascinating stuff. Unfortunately, if the directing by Joram Lürsen was decent enough, it wasn’t really inspired either. As a result, he did manage to tell this story but I think it would have been just as exciting to read the whole story on Wikipedia. For example, at some point, Walraven van Hall told his kids about some pirates and, from time to time, the character was described as some adventurer and it could have been interesting to further develop this aspect of this character but the damned thing remained just terribly clean and sober. Following the same idea, I always had a weak spot for Barry Atsma, he is in my opinion one of the most charismatic Dutch actors at work nowadays, but by now, I have seen half of his movies and, to be honest, the guy pretty much always plays the same way for every movie and every character. In this case, his performance was not bad but he could have delivered something much wilder (see for example what Leonardo DiCaprio did in ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’). As a result, I never felt that I was getting closer to what van Hall might have been really thinking or feeling back then. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, it was still a fascinating story and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre.