Telegraph
March 16, 2001

STEP back two decades and war becomes, in Enemy at the Gates, little more than a noisy, expensive backdrop. Director and co-writer Jean-Jacques Annaud wants to have his cake and eat it, recreating the Battle of Stalingrad on an impressively large scale, but constantly blocking our view with close-ups of his uninteresting central characters.

Accidental heroes: Joseph Fiennes and Jude Law in Enemy at the Gates

He has taken inspiration from reports about a Russian sniper called Vassili Zaitsev, whose exploits made him a propaganda hero (there are monuments erected to his memory in Moscow and Volgograd). By far the most involving sequences are those in which Zaitsev (Jude Law) and a decorated German aristocrat (Ed Harris) stalk each other through the city's ruined buildings in a deadly battle of wits.

Harris - in whom cast-iron gravitas and subtle menace regularly go hand in hand - is terrific. But in every other respect Annaud's film is an unwieldly Euro-pudding, saddled with dialogue that sounds like a bad translation of Tolstoy. For much of the time, it plots the points of a hackneyed love triangle, as Zaitsev and his propaganda officer Danilov (Joseph Fiennes) are both smitten by their fellow soldier Tania (Rachel Weisz).

Law and Fiennes, sporting matching stubble, just aren't good enough, and neither is James Horner's music, which lazily pastiches all of his own past scores and John Williams's main theme from Schindler's List.