Good

Rating:

* *

Verdict:

No, it's rather less than that

.

This would seem to be the last of the wave of Nazi-themed films for a while. Unfortunately, despite supposedly sound foundations (a play by C.P. Taylor) and the presence of Mortensen as a mild-mannered German academic who stumbles his way into Hitler's SS, it also feels like the least of them.

It has some weighty ideas to it - the case for euthanasia, the seductive influence of power, among others - but on screen, this is either going over familiar territory or they feel barely developed. And those stage origins are all too apparent, with a odd stiffness to just about every scene. That's not helped by some of the cast sporting English accents as tweedy as their jackets.

Mortensen's John Halder is a liberal professor of literature whose chaotic home life - including an ailing mother and a permanently distracted wife - is interrupted when his novel, which features a mercy killing, comes to the attention of the Nazi Party.

They like his ideas very much so they commission him to write something further that might convince other good Germans that putting unfortunate folks out of their misery isn't such a bad idea.

So he does, which soon has him on a slippery slope - upwards. He's promoted, takes up with one of his more ambitious Aryan students and, despite the protestations of his Jewish best friend (Isaacs, the only convincing performance here), he deludes himself into thinking he is guiding the Third Reich from within. Even when they start burning books at his front door and rounding up his neighbours.

Eventually, he must confront the truth of the

Final Solution

in what must be the least confronting concentration camp scene of any film. It's a pitiful ending to a story that wants to be a parable about how the well-spoken end up doing the unspeakable, but ends up being that most remarkable of things, an utterly forgettable Holocaust film.

Russell Baillie

Cast:

Viggo Mortensen, Jason Isaacs, Jodie Whittaker

Director:

Vicente Amorim

Rating:

M (offensive)

Running time:

96 mins