Real-life thriller in Nazi-seized Denmark

Ole Christian Madsen, the Danish director of the exquisitely shot, exciting World War II film Flame & Citron, knows his Hollywood.

Set in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen during the final years of the war, Flame is a terrific, if sometimes monotonous, real-life thriller about two members of the Holger Danske resistance movement whose heroism earned them each a posthumous Medal of Honor.

With its moody, noir lighting and poetic voice-over, Flame rehearses virtually every element of the classic genre piece: violence, sex and romance, gunplay, spies, betrayals, a femme fatale, and a murderous Gestapo officer.

Madsen also has a good ear for melancholy. He balances the whizzing bullets and political intrigue with an elegiac tone and an existential edge just this side of nihilism.

Imagine Spielberg on a Nietzschean bender.

Flame opens with grainy newsreel footage of German soldiers entering the Danish capital. "Do you remember when they arrived?" Flame (Thure Lindhardt) asks in the voice-over. He's trying to explain why he does what he does for the resistance.

Soon we see what Flame and his friend Citron (brilliantly played by Quantum of Solace's Mads Mikkelsen) do. They assassinate Danish Nazis. Flame is so good at his job, the Gestapo has put a hefty reward on his head. He's a star.

"I know I'm doing the right thing," he says in the voice-over. "It's the only right thing."

That belief is bolstered by a bureaucratic machinery that legitimizes the killing: The duo are given kill assignments by a lawyer, Aksel (Peter Mygind), who in turn answers to the British Army and a set of Danish political bosses in exile in Sweden.

Yet, as the film progresses, we're hit by a series of uncomfortable questions about the morality of war and the meaning of heroism.

Are the assassins justified if they're ordered to kill someone the political bosses don't like? What if they accidentally hurt a civilian?

The situation spirals out of control when Flame falls for the beautiful resistance spy Ketty (Stine Stengade). Soon, he's investigating her as a possible double agent.

By the end, his work becomes harder - though not impossible - to justify.

Flame has some rough, tedious patches - at 130 minutes, it's simply too long. And its reiteration of Hollywood cliches isn't always successful.

Regardless, it is, along with Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, one of the most accomplished films to come out of the recent wave of neoclassic and revisionist WWII films, which includes the equally boring American and German versions of Valkyrie, In Tranzit, and Defiance.

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