Collateral damage

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This article was published 12/08/2016 (3512 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In contemporary cinema, one of the goofier clichés is the crisp, unperturbed, remorseless assassin.

You’ve seen him (or her) plenty of times: the cool customer, effortlessly shifting in and out of various identities on a mission to take out a target with brilliant calculation and chilling efficiency.

Anthropoid is not that movie. In fact, you may not have seen an assassination movie in which the assignment is quite so messy in terms of preparation, execution, and collateral damage.

Directed and co-written (with Anthony Frewin) by Sean Ellis, the film tells the true story of Operation Anthropoid, the Second World War mission to assassinate SS Gen. Reinhard Heydrich in German-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1942.

Parachuted into this dangerous country are Czechoslovak nationals Jan Kubis (Jamie Dornan) and Josef Gabcik (Cillian Murphy), two men ruthless in their resolve but relatively green when it comes to active service. The two enter Prague and find the remnants of the nation’s resistance understandably reluctant about carrying out this mission from England, given the Nazi penchant for retaliatory violence. (There’s also the small detail that British prime minister Neville Chamberlain was a signatory to the Munich Agreement, which essentially sacrificed Czechoslovakia to German occupation in 1938.)

Kubis and Gabcik, two members of a seven-man team, proceed to study Heydrich’s travelling habits in preparation for the main event. Kubis also falls in love with Marie (Charlotte Le Bon), a young woman on the periphery of the family that initially shelters the two men. Gabcik disapproves, but he, too, falls under the spell of a woman, Marie’s friend Lenka (Prague-born actress Anna Geislerova), whom he initially recruits to provide cover on social outings in Prague.

The film departs from the usual structure of such films, which would leave the actual mission for the climax of the second act. Here, it comes roughly midway through the movie. The attempt doesn’t quite go as planned, and Ellis duly presents the bloody aftermath in an even-handed effort to show the terrible cost of some political actions, no matter how justified. (Heydrich, a high-ranking Nazi, was also an architect of the Final Solution.)

But if the film feels structurally lopsided, it is a pretty gripping piece of work. The blue-eyed Murphy is in his wheelhouse in the role of a sensitive soul compelled to calculating violence. Dornan, last seen unsuccessfully attempting to flesh out the kinky industrialist cipher-hero of Fifty Shades of Grey, has more luck here in the role of an assassin reluctant to relinquish his humanity to his mission.

Anthropoid won’t make anywhere near the box office of Fifty Shades, of course. One would guess Dornan would much rather have audiences see him in this movie. He wouldn’t be wrong.

randall.king@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @FreepKing