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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