Operation Daybreak in 1975 came a decade after the golden age of World War 2 movies. Perhaps as a result, it remains an unfairly overlooked film and the true story of the attempted assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the SS General who was third in the Nazi hierarchy, in 1942 is now retold in Sean Ellis’ Anthropoid.
Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan play Czech soldiers, Josef Gabcík and Jan Kubis, who travel from exile in England and are parachuted back into their home country for the mission. The build-up to and the scenes involving that assassination attempt are magnificently portrayed. So tense, captured brilliantly by Ellis’ shaky-cam that brings home the chaos as the plan unravels and the men have to improvise. However, the larger part of the film depicts what happens to the conspirators afterwards as they try to evade the German retaliation and escape with their lives. That part of the film doesn’t disappoint either with a stunning nail-biting sequence of the men, holed up in a church, resisting the Nazis for as long as they can, the highlight.
Despite the sense of inevitably about the fate of Josef and Jan, and some gruesome torture scenes, this had me totally gripped from beginning to end. Dornan is much better here than in the abysmal 50 Shades of Grey, and Murphy hasn’t been better since The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006). Among an otherwise largely unknown cast, Toby Jones adds a touch of class as one of the Czech resistance leaders.
Almost everything works, even two romantic subplots that could well have come across as unnecessary, but in fact add another depth to the film. Raising interesting questions about how much you should sacrifice in pursuit of a worthy cause and whether the killing of one of the most evil men who ever lived is justified when the retaliatory consequences will be very severe, this is a film to make you think as much as it will thrill you.
There is just one part that didn’t work – a too obvious and melodramatic moment towards the end as Josef remembers his lost love – and some of the accents to start with are a bit too generic east-European, but after a while that didn’t bother me anymore.
Rating: 9 out of 10