This movie is spoken in the language of Norway. It opens up with a group of young adults making jokes and fooling around. However at that same time, the Second World War has opened up and their antics become more serious as the film develops. Max Manus, through chance, becomes to be pretty good at sabotaging Nazi ships and he also becomes pretty good at escaping the confounds of jail and torture, where some of his friends are not so lucky. Manus, the lead character in this movie, is an unpretentious man who has some admirable qualities which the Norwegian government appears to be recognizing. Unlike the movie Anthropoid, this movie did not have a straight-forward plot nor climax. Instead the viewer is guessing as to what will transpire. Tom Cruise in movies like Mission Impossible, is a way better actor then the actor that plays Max Manus. I found this war movie to have little suspense and very little action. Perhaps this movie could have better been made into a documentary, with the personal testimony of Max Manus and his wife, combined with actual photographs and writing accounts.

So many war films are just Hollywood idea of how chisel jawed clean cut Americans defeated the Nazi hoard across Europe.Not so Max Manus.For once a war film with a proper story that isn't just a story but all true. After watching this film I went straight to the library to look him up.A remarkable chap and a credit to his nation.A great boys own adventure, no gooey love seen, not full of gallons of fake blood and thousands of rounds being fired. Just a no nonsense as it happened film.Go see it.

Wonderful movie, I'd say.I would have liked to have seen more of Max's experiences while he was fighting with the Finns against Russians. My grandfather and his brothers came back from that war broken, which even I, after decades had passed, could see.Almost all Nordic countries were going 'under the boot' at that time, albeit from different sources. Denmark and Norway suffered from Germany's invasion and Finland suffered from Russia's. Although, they never bested us. :) The numbers were 10 Russians against 1 Finn at the worst times but still we prevailed. Oh, by the way, Stalin was even worse than Hitler. Most of the western world just doesn't know about it.

Thus speaks Wikipedia: "Max Manus (1914–1996) was a Norwegian resistance fighter during World War II. He was a pioneer of the Norwegian resistance movement and was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941. He escaped to the United Kingdom for training and went back as a saboteur for the Norwegian Independent Company 1, better known as Lingekompaniet. He became a specialist in ship sabotage, was famous for being one of the most brilliant saboteurs during World War II, and after the war he wrote several books about his adventures." Hmm, sounds like it was only a question of time before this guy's life story would be made into a movie!In its native Norway the film has been highly popular among the public which is not hard to understand considering it is a very traditional and technically well-made war film. The basis of the plot was already summarized in the first paragraph: a volunteered veteran of the Finnish Winter War, Max Manus (Aksel Hennie) is enraged to see his beloved Norway being taken over by the Nazis in the early 1940s and quickly organizes an underground resistance movement with his friends Kolbein, Tallak and Gram (Christian Rubeck, Mats Eldøen and Nicolai Cleve Broch). Ships are sunk and bullets fly but Manus never loses his hope in the face of the enemy, personified in the Gestapo officer Siegfried Fehmer (Ken Duken).The filmmakers are clearly well aware of the conventions of heroic war movies and utilize them unrestrainedly in the story. The cinematography is pleasantly brownish-yellowish in the interior scenes and creates an atmosphere of old photographs that always suits well movies set in recent history. The exteriors are also filmed beautifully, particularly the short training scenes in Scotland, and the night scenes bask in pretty twilight blue. Unfortunately the professionalism of the production also leads to overt Hollywood-style conventionality of the plot: of course there is a romance (with a woman named Tikken, played by Agnes Kittelsen), of course friends get killed, of course the good are good and the bad are bad. I understand that many of these things actually did happen in real life but since this is not a documentary, they could have been changed a little in order to spice up the tale with something more unexpected than the obvious hero plot.OK, some of the mine-setting scenes are fairly suspenseful and the story occasionally catches a beautiful sense of melancholy, most notably at the end. In general, the plot is at its most interesting when examining Manus' traumatic Winter War memories and feelings of guilt when his friends and innocent people are punished for his rebellious actions; I wish such inner demons would have been paid more attention at the expense of the Nazis, the obvious enemy. There are also some flat-out clichés in the movie, such as the bad guys being lousy marksmen, and the overly shaky camera during several emotionally charged moments annoyed the heck out of me.Be that as it may, I am sure there is an audience for Max Manus outside Norway as well. Personally the thin drama plot did not get me hooked very much but friends of traditionally heroic resistance tales should find everything they are looking for in the film. Furthermore, Aksel Hennie in the titular role bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Steve Buscemi – never a bad thing! So, go ahead and give it a look if it sounds like your kind of movie; you might end up enjoying it a lot more than I did.