The Melbourne Age
26 July 2001
By Philippa Hawker

Ah, World War II ... The Love Triangle War. The attack on Pearl Harbor recently provided a tropical backdrop for Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett and Kate Beckinsale to work out their relationship issues. Now, in Enemy at the Gates, the Battle of Stalingrad is the setting for a lovestruck Joseph Fiennes to come to terms with the fact that Rachel Weisz is much more interested in Jude Law than in him - even though Weisz is a student of languages and Law an illiterate sniper who doesn't know how to spell "coal".

But while Pearl Harbor, the movie, was a half-hour battle sequence swathed in more than an hour-and-a-half of semi-comical soppiness, Enemy at the Gates aims a littler higher.

It begins with a painfully realistic depiction of battle, the kind of thing you've come to expect in a movie with a military subject. Co-writer and director Jean-Jacques Annaud (Quest for Fire, Seven Years in Tibet) seems briefly interested in giving us a grim general picture of life under siege, but soon shifts the focus to a small number of characters.

Vassili Zaitsev (played with boyish sultriness by Law) is something of an innocent, not really aware of the value of his skills as a marksman. He demonstrates them to an officer, Danilov (Fiennes), whose mission he naively redeems. Danilov perceives Vassily's propaganda value to the war effort, and promotes him in newspapers and fliers, representing him as a kind of Ian Thorpe of sniping. (There was, apparently, a real Sniper Zaitsev, a legendary figure in the Russian war effort.)

Meanwhile, Tania (Weisz), a young Jewish woman whose parents have been killed by the Nazis, declares her commitment to Vassily, rather than the smitten Danilov - given an over-the-top intensity by Fiennes (who looks as if the make-up department was instructed to give him the Final Stages of Tuberculosis foundation and blusher combination). However, there is another more potent and intimate relationship in the movie: the bond between Vassily and the man brought in by the Germans to dispatch him, the aristocratic Major Konig (Ed Harris), who dedicates himself to finding out all he can about his target.

Annaud seems to be aiming for a mythic resonance in these potentially engrossing cat-and-mouse, hunter-versus-hunted episodes, which take place in bombed-out buildings, among rubble and bodies. Yet he doesn't seem interested in creating tension: there's something laborious about the way that this part of the story is played out. In the end, his characters don't have much more life or substance than the propaganda figures of Danilov's imagination.