As the world teeters on the brink of annihilation, Dietrich Bonhoeffer joins a deadly plot to assassinate Hitler, risking his faith and fate to save millions of Jews from genocide.
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CinemaSerf
6
By CinemaSerf
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Jonas Dassler) is a pacifist pastor who is furious at the acquiescence of the German church with the rise of the Naziism and the establishment of the puppet “Reichskirche”. Unlike many, though, he is prepared to use his position in the pulpit and preach to anyone who will listen of the folly of this plan. Needless to say, this doesn’t go down well and so he has to spend a lot of time out of the country whilst many of those left behind fall victim to persecution. That absence has it’s uses, though, as he hopes to galvanise opinion in both the USA and the UK - a task all the harder when his forebodings fall largely on deaf or unwilling ears. It’s when his colleagues come up with a plan to assassinate their Führer that the threads of his multi-timeline story and his life start to come together and we realise just how perilous his position is when he finally returns to his homeland. The is a true story of a man who dared to fight back in the face of overwhelming odds, indifference and fear - but sadly I just found Dassler didn’t, well, dazzle. Even at his most animated, his characterisation was underwhelming and contributory to this looking more like a high-end television movie rather than an enlightening story of courage and, to a certain extent, faith. The ensemble cast do well enough, but again there isn’t really an anchor role to give it the necessary gravitas either within the church, or amongst his allies. Even Churchill is presented as lacklustre. Bonhoeffer was a jazz lover and that does give us an excuse to indulge in the odd bit of toe-tapping, and the whole story is a savage indictment of complicity when the state gets up on it’s hind legs and mobilises the militia and the militant, but this disappointed, sorry.
