Bad Aim

At the Gates, a gripping showdown is bungled by a love triangle

Comments (0) By Robert Wilonsky Thursday, Mar 15 2001
...continued from page 1
Hey, kids, get a room: Rachel Weisz and Jude Law find a little time to play "Hide the Rifle" in Enemy at the Gates.
Hey, kids, get a room: Rachel Weisz and Jude Law find a little time to play "Hide the Rifle" in Enemy at the Gates.

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But Annaud and Godard aren't content with merely recounting the face-off between two warriors; they insist on recounting the entire myth, which comes complete with a love triangle between Danilov, Vassili, and a Russian soldier named Tania (Rachel Weisz). Danilov wants to use Tania, who can read German, as a translator of intercepted communiqués, but she insists on being assigned to the front; as a Jew whose parents were murdered by the Nazis, she seeks revenge with a rifle, not a pen. Danilov wants Vassili to talk her out of fighting, but it's a moot point: Vassili and Tania are comrades-in-arms, literally (they make love amid sleeping soldiers in one touching, almost erotic scene that's less about showing and more about feeling). Danilov, upon discovering their relationship, goes nearly mad, threatening to "reveal" his heroic sniper as a traitorous coward.

The love story, not to mention plot holes large enough to swallow entire platoons, so bogs down the story that whatever tension the Vassili-Konig confrontation creates disappears every time Weisz appears on-screen; she tears apart comrades--and the movie. By the end, we care little whether this is a true story or not, because Annaud has rendered his tale so mushy and, worse, predictable that we feel more manipulated than moved. It's as though Annaud had so little faith in his main story that he felt the need to turn a subplot into his entire plot--World War II as the world's worst first date.

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