Simply Perfect

Sadly Over-hyped

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

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.

I cannot understand how this movie gets 7.8 in IMDb. It is a complete disaster! How a tragic, dramatically dense and tense theme (promising extraordinary things had a talented scriptwriter taken the job) ended up as a bland cartoon with linear characters and all disrespect for credibility is something truly unexplainable.There is not a single credible scene in the movie; nothing sticks to the golden rule of plausibility: neither the direction, nor the acting and much less the script. Even if this is based on real events, the director has managed to present them in the most unbelievable way, not once, not twice, but scene after scene until the end, making the spectators sigh with regret and repeating to themselves "Oh, come on! Not again! Is this a joke?".The characters in a Disney cartoon have more depth and hues than the ones we find here. Lieutenant Franken?? My goodness, his villain smiles and his acting deserve to be nominated among the worst of the decade. The arch villains in Batman (the 60s TV series by Adam West) make more complex characters.The twists and turns in the plot, which should have contributed to create tension and suspense, are so serendipitous, stretched out and poorly presented that they make you laugh or cover your face in embarrassment: "Is this Saturday Night Live and I have missed the initial credits?".In short, although I was very well predisposed to enjoy this movie when it started, I couldn't have been more disappointed.

I came across Black Book after reading somewhere that after his post Robocop and Basic Instinct decline into absurdity, Black Book marked a glorious return to form for Paul Verhoeven, And needing a DVD to watch and coming across Black Book at £3 in an Asda (the UK's Wall-Mart) bargain bin, I thought 'why not?'Well, I should, perhaps, also have asked myself just what a movie - the most expensive Dutch movie ever made, no less - was doing languishing in the bargain bins less than 10 months after its release. I suspect you know where this is going. I had, in fact, only ever seen Robocop of Verhoeven's earlier films and had rather liked it's satirical touches, although on reflection it hadn't quite been the satire I had thought it to have been. Black Book made me ask myself: when we watch a movie, exactly what is it we want? Simple entertainment or something greater? Well, often, of course, it's simple entertainment.Despite all the 'auteurs' and the 'homage' we 'serious' film fans are supposed to pay 'auteurs', there also has to be time out when we can set aside the quest to investigate the human condition for an hour or two, grab the popcorn and settle down to watch a little undemanding nonsense. And why not? Yet when a movie chooses to deal with what was one of the most shocking and tragic periods of recent European history and which, furthermore, directly acknowledges the most horrific aspect of that time, the wholesale slaughter of millions of Jews, quite apart from also touching upon such ultra-sensitive areas as the degree and methods of the Dutch resistance and the collaboration of other Dutch with the Nazis, including the betrayal of fellow citizens for venal gain, it is surely fair to expect that movie to rise a little above the status and ambitions of 'undemanding nonsense'.But, to his shame, Paul Verhoeven never even tries to. He is quite content to churn out a large-scale potboiler, and one, furthermore, whose script is surprisingly lazily put together for a movie with this kind of budget and apparent aims. It would be tedious and boring for both you, the reader, and me, the writer, to list the script's many, many flaws and inconsistencies. I'll simply remark that Verhoeven and his co-writer were not in the slightest concerned with producing a truthful and honest tale. All they wanted to do was to make sure 'the action' roared ahead at breakneck speed and that you and I were given no opportunity at all to question the plot's many twists and turns. So: if 'undemanding nonsense' is your thing, packaged with a spurious mystery and a little, tho' not much, trademark Verhoeven soft porn, this is the film for you, available at your nearest supermarket bargain bin.If, given Black Book's painful and tragic subject matter, you want a movie which takes both you and itself seriously, forget it.

This movie needs to be taken with huge grain of salt if you don't want to tear your hair out while watching it.I suppose it depends on what sort of expectations you have beforehand, but that can really always be used to defend a movie, as well as argue for differing viewer's experiences, much like the fact that many of us have varying tastes in movies. However, I think some things can be more or less objectively agreed upon by people who appreciate the art of film and cinema.The suspension of disbelief required for this movie to make any kind of lasting impression is MASSIVE. The script feels unfinished, almost as if the rough draft that outlined the films events was passed for a finished product. Where major plot development or emotional discharge is expected, the acting performances fall short and disappoint time and again.Where do I even begin to exemplify this? I felt like every three minutes something in this movie irritated me to the point that I almost gave up watching it. Was it the jolly and utterly unconvincingly acted coincidental reunion of a Jewish woman with her family after being separated by years of Nazi occupation? Or the lack of emotional burden expressed by her at the equally sudden death of said family moments later vis-a-vis the hysteric attack that ensues after she learns of the execution of her Nazi officer lover, Captain Muntze? Or maybe the blind trust placed by Dutch Resistance fighters in said Captain, who after sleeping with our undercover Jewish heroine turns out to be a very compassionate and helpful guy despite years of service to the Reich? Or possibly the ease with which a Canadian commander, having liberated a Dutch town, is persuaded to comply with a German military tribunal sentence by a NAZI GENERAL, and the crime was NOT carrying out retributions towards FAMILIES OF DUTCH RESISTANCE FIGHTERS? Yes, and there was more, much more.When the main lead, who by the way is infiltrating a Nazi HQ in order to get back at the enemy, reveals her affiliation with Dutch Resistance to an obviously promiscuous female co-worker of ambiguous loyalty and weak character, you know someone doesn't give two shits about contextual credibility. Even though the setting and premise of the film are interesting, it all becomes irrelevant through it's lack of depth or exploration of...anything. The films pace gives the impression that it was cut by a person with severe ADD who got bored with the scene they were working on between 5 and 10 minutes into it and just wanted to move on to the next one. I mean, when you can't even make a love scene reflect the sexual interest of at least one of the two people about engage in love-making, there really isn't much going for you by that point.This movie was a joke, a bad one too, and I don't see how this can be classified as one of Paul Verhoeven's so-called "satirical" works, thus somehow making it less terrible(?) Anyone who says that should stop talking, because you can't talk me into thinking you actually believe that poppycock. If you have any reverence for the time-period and the genre, you will probably feel the same way I do. If this movie was based on real events, as it states, then I hope it was based on them with a substantial amount of deviation from them.