Anthropoid

Cert: 15A. Now Showing

Getting too close to a project does not always pay off and here we have another case in point. Director and co-writer Sean Ellis (with Anthony Frewin) did enormous amounts of research into Operation Anthropoid, a covert op by the exiled Czech government during WWII to assassinate SS General Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. The resulting film is well-intentioned, worthy and historically accurate but largely lacks emotion so it deserves four stars for effort, but two for entertainment.

Josef Gabcík (Cillian Murphy) and Jan Kubis (Jamie Dornan) are parachuted near Prague, part of a team with the ambitious aim of assassinating SS General Heydrich, the man later known to have been the chief architect of the Final Solution. The plan meets with mixed responses from the local Resistance, no-one doubts that Heydrich is a worthy target, but the revenge for such an attack would be brutal. But fortunately Toby Jones, without whom no period thriller is complete, is there to put things in motion.

Whilst working out their plan the men stay with a local family and have local women as subterfuge, Marie (Charlotte Le Bon) and Lenka (Anna Geislerová). These women offer more than subterfuge and, although not much in the way of a sub plot, they do help create a sense of the fear in which occupied cities lived, the risks people took and the simultaneous need for and fear of emotional closeness. They provide the main protagonists with a humanity they otherwise lack. Both men are anxious about what they have to do, but why are they doing it? Where are they from? There isn’t that much for two very likeable actors to work with. The most exciting part of the film is at the end. And yet, even without huge emotion, it is a very good story.

***