I was looking forward to this movie, having already seen both Anthropoid and (a long time ago) Operation Daybreak and with the knowledge that a contemporary of mine from my old university college had co-written the script. However, this movie didn't really know what it wanted to be: a study of the motivations that made Reinhard Heydrich the monster he was?; an account of the plotting and execution of his assassination?; or his role in masterminding the Final Solution?
It's a shame because the latter two things have already been well covered in movies and TV plays. Operation Daybreak and Anthropoid are essentially the same movie, although Anthropoid's casting of Cillian Murphy was a mistake because he is so distractingly good looking (I'd shag him and I'm not even gay!) that you are sitting there thinking "This really hot guy is supposed to be on an undercover mission? Maybe in a Bond movie!" So we already know enough about the daring mission and the reprisals. And then there was a very good account of the process of the Wannsee Conference that was done for the telly (with Kenneth Branagh playing Heydrich this time); this show prompted me to visit Haus am Wannsee on my last visit to Berlin, which was a very moving experience for me.
But the real opportunity here was to really get under Heydrich's skin and find out what made him tick. Some of what made him tick was alluded to in the first part of the movie but because of the restrictions of the two-hour length and the decision to, effectively, make this two movies in one we don't really get many answers. OK, we kind of get his wife sort of got him involved in the Nazi thing, but how did he get to be so powerful? I'm not buying that it was just because he could see how to run a chicken farm better than Himmler. More important, how did he become so brutal and unfeeling? These questions aren't really answered.
So, it's a missed opportunity because it tries to cover too much in too little time. Maybe the director and writers ought to have taken a look at the TV miniseries about Albert Speer from the early 1980s that starred Rutger Hauer. There was another opportunist (although, rather strangely, one whom history seems to have been kinder to even though he was responsible for working people to death in munitions factories) and you get some idea why he became so attracted to Hitler, how he was able to turn a blind eye given his ambition and how he was clever enough to avoid getting the hanging after the war he so obviously deserved.
For me, the most interesting thing about the Nazi era isn't the crazy mofos like Hitler, Himmler and the rest, but the enablers: the opportunists who are more concerned with personal ambition and who see their chances and take them, even if it means a lot of suffering for others. I find them interesting because there are more of these types around than perhaps we'd like to admit! And my view is that Heydrich was really one of these: in it for himself rather than some grand purpose!
