Enemy Lines: Loosely fact-based save-the-scientist war story plays like a game of Capture the Flag
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C.
Poland, November, 1943: The time-and-place of the action film Enemy Lines should probably be enough to put any of your current troubles in perspective.
As a bonus, the movie answers the question: Whatever happened to Ed Westwick, the guy with the cheekbones who played the wealthy debauched teenager Chuck Bass on Gossip Girl?
Ed Westwick (left) plays the commander of a special ops team trying to free a Polish scientist in Enemy Lines
In Enemy Lines, Westwick plays Major Kaminski, a terse Polish-American commander of a special-ops squad, who, along with his British counterpart, Colonel Preston (John Hannah), goes behind German lines to capture a Polish scientist, Dr. Faber (Pawel Delag). Dr. Faber has been forced to work for the Nazis and is under heavy guard.
The initial part of the mission is, despite one fatal setback, a technical success: The scientist is taken, along with his adolescent daughter. But the real troubles for the rescue squad - and for the movie - begin when the soldiers struggle to make their way back to safety with their valuable asset.
Instead of suspense, we get a series of stand-offs and repetitious gun battles as skirmishes ensue between Nazis, Russians and Polish resistance fighters, the latter led by (for gender balance) a comely resistance fighter (Ekaterina Vladimirova). Often, it's hard to keep the uniforms and head-gear straight, while the action unfolds like a game of capture the flag, full of chattering machine guns and bodies bleeding out in the snow.
Between shoot-outs, there are stilted strategy discussions full of clunky dialogue, delivered in an inconsistent mixture of English, German, Polish and Russian.
Though it plays like the kind of generic action movie parodied in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, the movie has some connection to historical reality. The script was inspired by the Alsos Mission, a European-based off-shoot of the Manhattan Project, designed to gather intelligence regarding German work on an atomic bomb. In real life, members of the Alsos team occasionally crossed into enemy territory, to scoop up scientists and resources before they fell into Soviet hands.
A movie with as generic a title as Enemy Lines can’t really be called a disappointment, but it is a missed opportunity. The closing onscreen text mentions Polish physicist Joseph Rotblat, who, while not involved in the Apsos mission, lost his wife to the Holocaust, escaped his homeland and worked on the Manhattan Project during the war. He later shared a 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on nuclear disarmament.
That sounds like a war story worth telling.
Enemy Lines. Directed by Anders Banke. Written by Michael Wright and Tom George. Starring: Ed Westwick, John Hannah, Pawel Delag and Ekatarina Vladimirova. Enemy Lines is available for rent or purchase on iTunes.