Friday 28 September 2012

"Cross of Honour" (Metro 28/09/12)


Cross of Honour (15) 105 mins **

Of last year’s Hogwarts graduates, we might now get a little worried for Rupert Grint. Where Daniel Radcliffe enjoyed a sizeable hit with February’s The Woman in Black, and Emma Watson’s upcoming The Perks of Being a Wallflower is earning respectable reviews, Grint has been cast out to Norway for this pretty ordinary WWII tale, crashlanding on DVD Monday. Worse still: landed with an over-emphatic Scouse accent and “Chubby” Brown’s unflattering helmet-and-goggles combo, Grint’s playing fifth fiddle behind three Germans and fellow Brit Lachlan Niebold, as grounded airmen obliged to seek collective shelter in a snowbound cabin.

Inspired by events more “actual” than “exciting”, Petter Naess’s film proves stubbornly resistant to all but the most obvious wartime conflicts. As the weather worsens, the flyboys divide their quarters, and argue over the washing-up; so close are these mundane tensions to those of the Big Brother house you half-expect voting lines to start appearing on screen. Instead, we’re left waiting for a rescue party to show or for the food to run out, and not learning anything revelatory in the meantime. “Without the unexpected, people get bored,” observes Niebold at one point. He’s not wrong.

Cross of Honour opens in selected cinemas today ahead of its DVD release on Monday.

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