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Defiance stars Daniel Craig, left, and Liev Schrieber. (PARAMOUNT)

Fanboys

THE love story at the centre of this road movie is not so much about a boy and a girl as it is between a group of man-boys and a movie franchise.

The year is 1998 and a quintet of post-high-school Star Wars fans decide they can't wait for the release of Episode I: The Phantom Menace, especially since one of their number, Linus (Christopher Marquette) is dying from an inoperable cancer and isn't expected to last until the film's 1999 release date.

Windows (Jay Baruchel), Eric (Sam Huntington), Hutch (Dan Foley) and girl-geek Zoe (Kristen Bell) join Linus on a cross-country mission to break into George Lucas's Lucasfilm estate on an impossible mission to steal a work print of the film. Along the way, they receive guidance from miscellaneous sources including Ain't It Cool News's über-geek Harry Knowles (played not by Knowles but Ethan Suplee) as well as... William Shatner?

While the film got to use authentic Star Wars sound effects and cast members, expect a few Star Trek gags too, spinning off the rivalry between Trek fans and Star Wars fans -- the Crips and Bloods of the nerd universe. That conflict has a few payoffs, as when Hutch takes a detour to Riverside, Iowa (the future birthplace of James Tiberius Kirk in Treklore) to sabotage the dedication of a statue in which Kirk battles Trek's ultimate villain, Khan.

Look closely and you'll see the officious Trek fan Admiral Seasholtz is played by Seth Rogen in one of two bit parts.

This much-tinkered-with, much-delayed film (it was supposed to come out in 2007) retains a few pleasures, including Foley (the ping-pong-playing hero of Balls of Fury), who employs a Belushi-like physicality, and Baruchel, way too convincing as a clueless virgin.

But it's a bit of a mess too. Instead of trusting the material's essence, director Kyle Newman is irresistibly drawn to lowest-common-denominator road-movie tropes, including a particularly awful scene where the boys are forced to strip at a gay biker roadhouse, or an even more gratuitous scene in Vegas in which two characters consort with a pair of willing beauties, not realizing they are hookers.

You have to wonder why the filmmakers bothered to patronize fans of the raunchy teen comedy, when they could have aiming their jokes squarely at the Star Wars fans.

It's my understanding there are sufficient numbers of that latter community to have guaranteed success. 2-1/2 stars

Defiance

IN August, Quentin Tarantino's latest film Inglourious Basterds will present a story of Jewish-American soldiers behind enemy lines unleashing vengeful hell on the Nazis.

As with any Tarantino film, one should expect pure fantasy based not on fact, but on other movies.

For those with a taste of something more reality-based, Defiance will do. It's based on the true story of the Bielskis, a group of Polish Jewish brothers who, in 1941, defied the murderous Nazi machine that was killing their fellow Jews by the thousands. They evaded the Nazis by hiding in the massive acreage of the Belarussian forest in Eastern Europe. By taking in hundreds of other Jewish refugees in the years that followed, this family of tough peasant stock saved as many as 1,200 of their fellow Jewish refugees by the end of the war.

Eldest brother Tivia (Daniel Craig, consuming his vodka neither shaken nor stirred but straight out of the bottle) and his younger brothers Zus (Liev Schreiber) and Asael (Jamie Bell) head for the safety of the forest upon discovering the murdered body of their father.

Once there, the brothers encounter more and more refugees who have escaped the cities and towns to literally wander in the wilderness. Tivia resolves to save them, reasoning that in the face of the death-dealing Nazis, "Living will be our revenge." But the bloody-minded Zus has more hands-on experience and enlists with Russian partisans to exact vengeance against the Germans, despite the fact many Russians have retained their long-held anti-Semitism from the days of the pogroms.

It's not a bad movie exactly, but director Edward Zwick (Blood Diamond) is a filmmaker whose cinematic default is always set to "moral outrage." Hence, his film tends to ring with an off-putting tone of righteousness, even as it mixes classic clichés (Tivia addresses new refugees from atop a white steed, like Henry V) with contemporary movie clichés (after Tivia is stunned by a nearby shell blast, he witnesses the havoc of combat in muted slow motion).

Craig's picture is on the DVD box, but it is Schreiber who makes the deepest impression as Zus, because he is not afraid to commit to his character as a man so hardened by his experience as to be downright callous.

If only the movie was as tough-minded as its second-billed star. 3 stars

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

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Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 4, 2009 E4