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.

This multi-language film was made in Norway and celebrates a genuine hero of the Norwegian underground from World War II. Many films have been made about the French underground and resistance movements in other countries, including Norway. Only since the fall of the Iron Curtain (circa 1990), has the Western world been able to see some of the fine movies made about WW II in Eastern European countries. While an occasional WW II movie is still made in America, European war films tend to be superior since the turn of the 21st century. One would expect that to be the case with the nations where the war was fought. The memories, records and stories aren't so soon forgotten in the places where people lived through the horror, fear and oppression, and so many lost their lives.A few very good films have been made about Norwegian resistance. The earliest of those, "The Day Will Dawn" (aka, "The Avengers"), was made and released in Great Britain in June 1942. "Commandos Strike at Dawn," was a Columbia movie that came out Dec. 30, 1942. It was shown in the United Kingdom and the Americas in 1943. It made theaters in neutral Sweden in March 1944. "The Moon is Down" was a 1943 film by 20th Century Fox. It is about the German takeover of a Norwegian mining town, and the local resistance to the Nazis. These are among the best of the Norwegian underground movies. "Max Manus: Man of War" joins that list. This is a Norwegian film about a hero who led a life rife with killing for a war effort. It was made in 2008, a little over a decade after Manus died. It is one of the very best of all films made about Nazi resistance during World War II. This is an easy film to follow with English subtitles. The cast will mostly be little known west of the pond, but all do very well. Aksel Hennie is superb as Max Manus. Hennie portrays Manus as a man who loved his native country and was willing to fight to free it – even to death. But he also shows the emotional battles that Manus struggled through. He has flashbacks about killing an enemy soldier in Finland. He weeps over friends who are killed. And, he makes cold calculating decisions for actions that may kill innocent people. So, this film shows the inner turmoil and struggles over killing. Manus was something of a soldier of fortune before WW II. He had traveled to and worked in the jungles of South America and Latin America. The film shows his volunteer fighting for Finland in 1939-40 when Russia invaded that country. The film can't show all of the story, obviously, but before Manus got to England and Scotland for training, he was in the U.S. and Canada. When the USSR entered the war, Manus escaped from Norway east across Scandinavia to Russia, then down to Turkey and by ship to Capetown and on to America. He began training in the U.S. and Canada before crossing the Atlantic to England. The film has a nice ending, as it really happened, with Manus riding in a victory car as the main guard to the prince of Norway. He was attracted to his British embassy contact in Stockholm, Tikken Lindebraekke. At the end of the movie, she goes off with her husband and daughter. In real life, Manus and Tikken were married in 1947. After the war, Manus had a successful office supply company. He had frequent nightmares and bouts of depression with alcoholism. He wrote books about his earlier adventures and the war, and gave interviews. He lived to age 81, and died Sept. 20, 1996, in Spain. He and Tikken moved there after retiring.In spite of some of the technical aspects of this film, I rate it highly. The jumpiness of the cam shots is distracting and doesn't help the film. The plot does skip too abruptly in places, and I suspect that is due to some cutting during the edit to keep the film from being too long. Still, because of the detailed treatment of the Norwegian resistance surrounding this one man and his cohorts, I give the movie nine stars. It gives a real-life picture that we haven't seen in many resistance films set during WW II.

It's 1940. Finland quickly falls to the Nazis. Max Manus is injured fighting the Soviets. After recovering, he and his friends organize to resist. Their carelessness gets Max arrested but he escapes by jumping out of a hospital window. He gets training in Scotland and returns to sabotage against the Germans. He and his comrades are successful at first but are hunted by local Gestapo chief Siegfried Fehmer. Their handler is female agent Tikken. As security is heighten, Max must somehow sink a troop transport ship.It has some good action and some good resistance intrigue. It's also a bit rambling. It's probably a struggle to fit a real life story into a simple Hollywood style thriller. It also could have given Max Manus more of a personal drama during the war. It seems to give him his personal demons only after the war. If that's the real case, this could have started the movie with his modern day demons and then do the movie as a flashback to find the roots.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear. I walked into this movie knowing almost nothing about Max Manus and only knew somewhat about what he did. I think that might be the key into whether you're going to really enjoy this movie or not. I did like it but it does have problems.In case you don't know Max Manus was one of the best Norwegian Resistance fighters in the second World War. This movie seems to be Chronicling all of that while he must confront his alcoholism and nerve damage. Would this make way for a good movie? In my opinion Hell yes. It would probably make way for one of the best of it's kind but this does have problems.The biggest gripe for me is that the people who made this movie are shoe-horning in a lot of things for a near 2 hour movie. It kind of skips quite a bit. An example is when Max's best friend Gregers dies. That could show some great drama for what he would be going through... In the next scene it's a few months later. Sometimes when this happens it even skips almost a year. I know almost nothing about this guy is there really nothing they could have shown that would have been just as interesting as what we've already seen. I mean they cut from Max escaping Nazi control by crossing to the Swedish border to him getting trained in Scotland almost a year later. You know what I wouldn't have minded it if the time length was extended to three hours or so.I did like how some of the drama was handled though. While this movie does skip over some things I did like how the post-war scene was handled when Tikken and Max are talking when Max says he has no education, no job and no money and therefore has nothing to live for. There are some scenes like that when I did like the way it was handled.I also liked the acting and the cinematography of this movie. All of the cast do a pretty good job at acting the parts and some of the shots are actually quite impressive to look at. In terms of cinematography I guess I enjoyed the flashbacks to Max fighting on the Front Line in Finland the most.So I guess if you want to watch this movie - I think you should do a little homework on this guy before you watch it, he does actually sound like an interesting guy to look up. Some of the scenes are handled pretty well and others aren't. This is a decent movie to watch but I don't think it's as good as people are saying it is.EDIT: Now that I have done some research on the real guy... Why didn't they include some of these events in this film?