Anthro­poid

Oper­a­tion Anthro­poid was a top secret plan set in motion by British sol­diers dur­ing World War Two. The objec­tive: to rub out a mem­ber of the Third Reich’s inner cir­cle, Rein­hard Hey­drich. Set at the heart of Nazi-occu­pied Prague, Anthro­poid is a film that slogs pon­der­ous­ly through its ver­bose first half.

It fol­lows Jan (Jamie Dor­nan) and Josef (Cil­lian Mur­phy) as they attempt to take down a man infa­mous­ly cred­it­ed as help­ing to mas­ter­mind the ​“Final Solu­tion”, and was con­sid­ered one of the most unpleas­ant mem­bers of the Nazi elite. Hitler him­self nick­named him ​‘the man with the iron heart’, which speaks to the urgency of their mis­sion. But what appears as a grip­ping chron­i­cle of a dan­ger­ous scheme sore­ly lacks for impact. The film lingers too long on fast-paced dia­logue sequences, which are fur­ther cloud­ed by the use of Eng­lish with thick Czech accents.

For the first hour we find our­selves in close prox­im­i­ty to Jan and Josef as they live in hid­ing with a fam­i­ly at the cen­tre of the city. We’re intro­duced to Marie (Char­lotte Le Bön) and her friend Lenka (Anna Geislerová), effec­tive roman­tic foils who also help the men to keep a low pro­file as they pre­pare. Mur­phy and Dor­nan ini­tial­ly seem an unlike­ly, mis­matched duo as the per­pe­tra­tors behind a polit­i­cal assas­si­na­tion. Yet Mur­phy real­ly man­ages to immerse him­self in the role from the get go. Dor­nan, mean­while, is slow­er to find his feet, though his char­ac­ter expe­ri­ences a sat­is­fy­ing evo­lu­tion as the sto­ry rolls on. When nerves set in the night before, Josef helps Jan through an episode of pan­ic, offer­ing us a glimpse of his vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and allow­ing the leads to reveal hid­den depths to their onscreen partnership.

Things get more excit­ing in the sec­ond half. The dra­ma and pac­ing are ramped up. Direc­tor Sean Ellis man­ages to cap­ture the human ele­ment of war with­out shy­ing away from its bru­tal­i­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly evi­dent in a winc­ing­ly graph­ic tor­ture scene near­er the film’s end. Fast cuts and care­ful use of sound dynam­ics are cru­cial to cre­at­ing the ten­sion that dri­ves the finale’s puls­ing cli­mat­ic stand-off. It’s a won­der the sub­ject of this mis­sion hasn’t been explored more onscreen, as it makes for an eye-open­ing delve into a lit­tle known aspect of World War Two intrigue. A film of two halves, then, Anthro­poid rewards patience with its intense and emo­tion­al­ly charged sec­ond half and also proves to be a grat­i­fy­ing piece of action-thriller hokum.