The Scotsman, UK
March 15, 2001
By Damien Love

SET against the siege of Stalingrad, the most memorable thing about Enemy at the Gates is the vision it presents of a city reduced almost to ashes. Buildings are at best gutted, blackened hulks, shadowy apartment blocks and factories standing beneath a palling sky like caricatures of what they were.

Jean-Jacques Annaud's movie itself resembles some blasted concrete slab, but turns out to have had most of its reinforcing removed and replaced with a skeleton of chocolate and corn. It's a frustrating film, because you glimpse flashes of how extraordinary it could have been if the courage to stay focused and mean had prevailed.

Jude Law plays Vassily Zeitsev, an inexperienced soldier from the Urals, thrown into the grey maw of the battle. With the enemy encroaching on the city bearing their leader's name, the demoralised Soviet troops are between a rock and a hard place. Ordered to rush the Nazi guns, they are routinely cut down in droves; if they falter, they are shot by their own superiors.

Following another failed attack, a Soviet propaganda officer, Danilov (Joseph Fiennes), witnesses Zeitsev, taught to shoot as a child, picking off a handfu l of German officers with a rifle. He writes up the story with rhetorical embellishment, casting the young soldier as a folk hero to inspire the beleaguered nation. A reluctant icon, Zeitsev is transferred to the sniper division, his continuing exploits loudly trumpeted; so loudly that his fame reaches Berlin, from whence the Third Reich's own far-famed shootist, Major Koenig (Ed Harris), is dispatched to hunt and kill him.

Unfortunately, grafted on to the very taut cat-and-mouse chase that ensues as the two stalk one another through the ruins, is a wholly gratuitous love story, centred around Rachel Weisz as a plucky young soldier-lass for whom both Law and Fiennes fall. Indeed, although the desperate opening battle has a visceral, Private Ryan-ish rush, Enemy at the Gates is fundamentally old-fashioned, in the worst sense. Early on comes one of those Dad's Army animated maps of Europe.

The casting is similarly quaint - Russians and Germans are played by British and US actors, Bob Hoskins's cockney Khrushchev stirring memories of John Wayne's Roman centurion in The Greatest Story Ever Told. But when this uneasy amalgam of David Lean and Sam Peckinpah does get down to the patiently conducted, long-range battle between the two shooters, it comes to life, in tense, hard-lined scenes.

Law is good as the man from shepherding stock who sheds numb shock and confusion whenever he lifts a rifle to his eye, but it is Harris who raises the movie. Working with incredibly dense economy, electricity behind his gaze, he imbues the character of Koenig with a complexity that is sadly lacking in the film around him, and he has to do little more than turn up to hold you riveted.

This movie was never about looks exchanged by Law and Weisz, but about the different ways Law and Harris smoke cigarettes and search for one another in gunsight crosshairs while the larger conflict hums around them.