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Oscar nominee Land Of Mine ticks away predictably

LAND OF MINE (Martin Zandvliet). 101 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (February 17). See listing. Rating: NNN


After the liberation of Denmark in 1945, hundreds of German POWs were forced to defuse 2.2 million Nazi land mines along the country’s western coast with minimal training and resources. Many were very young, recruited and sent to war because the Third Reich was running out of cannon fodder. More than half of them were killed or seriously maimed before the coast was cleared.

This story serves as an awful footnote to the Second World War. Martin Zandvliet’s Land Of Mine tries to turn it into a teachable moment.

Zandvliet, who made the solid Paprika Steen drama Applause a few years back, packages this volatile material as safely as possible in a mainstream drama about the horrors of war. Though we’re supposed to think about how everyone suffered, I wonder whether this is really the right time for a movie that argues Nazis were people, too.

Well, some Nazis anyway. The ones in Land Of Mine are baby-faced teenagers utterly unprepared for combat, let alone the sort of high-tension munitions work to which they’re assigned. But the Danish military would rather see Germans die defusing German mines than Danish citizens, and if they’re sending children, well, sons paying for the sins of their fatherland feels like justice.

Zandvliet also plays on our sympathies by telling this story from the perspective of a hard-bitten Danish sergeant (Roland Møller) who’s introduced beating a helpless German POW to a pulp but eventually comes to care for the young POWs under his command.

It’s a tried and tested character arc, and it’s very safe it also has a way of telegraphing the emotional stakes of any given scene. For a movie in which anything can explode at any moment, Land Of Mine is awfully predictable.

Zandvliet is also the kind of filmmaker who keeps a dog and a little girl around just in case his audience doesn’t empathize with the German characters in peril: everything is a calculation. But it’s the kind of calculation that gets you an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language feature, which is why the movie’s in theatres now.

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