ENEMY AT THE GATES

A cinematic re-enactment of probably the most pivotal event in 20th-century world history - the Battle of Stalingrad - Enemy at the Gates has its occasional moments of considerable war-flick power, and might have even been worthy of respect had the casting not been so self-evidently insane. You're trying to reconstruct a brutal battle to the death between two sets of mortal enemies in sub-zero conditions - who, then, do you cast in the central roles? Who best to convey the harshness and savagery of humankind thrown into a kill-or-be-killed situation?

Eh, how about three of England's most inherently twee, luvvieish and unseasoned young pups? Jude Law, Joseph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, maybe?

A stunning miscalculation of Crimean War-style proportions, the casting hopelessly torpedoes Enemy At The Gates' ambitions of being taken seriously as any kind of credible account of the war that saved us all from ruin. It's a shame, too, since the rest of the film isn't awful by any means. As befits the most expensively-made European project of all time, it serves up plenty by way of pure spectacle, frequently echoing the early stages of Saving Private Ryan in its unsparing grimness and

blood-lust.

To its credit, Enemy of the Gates makes no pretence of political commentary, presenting itself simply as an old-fashioned battlefield epic - and it manages to be pretty involving for the most part,

especially when it dispenses with the hackneyed love-triangle human-interest yarn at the narrative's centre and focuses on the actual

war. Little ground is broken that hasn't already been well-trodden in countless war-movies to date,

but the extravagant budget is skillfully deployed in the service of graphic hell-breaks-loose visual chaos, and the script manages to capture at least a fleetingly authentic grasp of the subject's unimaginable horrors.

With a cast of unknowns, then, this might have been an acceptable offering - but nobody who saw Law in The Talented Mr. Ripley, Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love or Weisz in Stealing Beauty will be able to hold a straight face during what purport to be the film's pivotal scenes. Law is the most grievous offender, portraying the Red Army's prize sniper Vasily Zaitsev and managing to detract from the drama every single time he is on screen - but Weisz doesn't exactly help, especially when Nazi aircraft start bombarding the very ground around them and she coos 'Oooh, what are we going to do?'

Fiennes at least lends some air of weariness to the proceedings, and there's some brief fun to be had watching Bob Hoskins in a thoroughly over-the-top turn as a maniacal Nikita Khrushchev...but though it has its share of moments to lift the blood pressure, Enemy at the Gates has to be seen as, at best, a questionable take on its subject. Approach cautiously