Defiance -- which puts the Oy! in Rambo -- is based on a true story.

In Hollywood-speak, this means everything but the details actually happened.

To clarify: Yes, there were Jewish partisans who wouldn't buckle under Nazi oppression during the Second World War.

And yes, the bare-knuckled, broad-boned Bielski brothers rescued hundreds from imminent genocide in 1941, even establishing a settlement of survivors in the thick, unforgiving Belarussian forest.

From there, they raided and attacked SS collaborators and, against crippling odds, carved out a communal existence for themselves in the face of wintry starvation.

So far, so good.

But around the time Tuvia Bielski (Daniel Craig, all steely-eyed glower) is galloping around the woods on a white horse, you can't but wonder how much reality has been massaged in the name of hokum, sentiment and invention.

If that's the case, it wouldn't be entirely unexpected, considering the director is Blood Diamond's Ed Zwick, a filmmaker whose work can be as well-crafted as it is gruellingly earnest.

Did I mention subtle? Case in point, the following exchange:

Sneering Red Army colonel: "Jews don't fight!"

Craig's flinty Bielski: "These Jews do!"

Knocked Up's Ben Stone, who once observed how Steven Spielberg's film Munich contributed to the sex lives of Jewish men, would doubtlessly be pleased.

Based on the non-fiction book by Nechama Tec, Defiance recounts how Tuvia, along with brothers Zus (Liev Schreiber) and Asael (Jamie Bell), banded together following the murders of their parents by Nazi allies to become resistance fighters.

The siblings, if you hadn't guessed, were a rough and tumble lot: Vodka-swilling, gun-toting and not the least bit hesitant about ensuring the Nazis felt their wrath.

This alone makes it a compelling chapter of seldom-referenced history because it runs contrary to the prevailing cinematic depiction of Jews during the Holocaust as passive victims.

But it is also, regardless of this context, a story bursting with courage, hope, despair, danger and death.

So what a disappointment it is then that Defiance, despite some gripping action and full-bodied performances, never amounts to much more than a rehash of cliches and ages-old narrative conventions.

Throughout, the people on-screen -- from the Bielskis to the huddled masses they shelter -- feel less like flesh and blood people than stock characterizations designed to forward a specific ideological agenda or plot point of the movie.

This even extends to the conflict Zwick manifests between Craig's Tuvia and Schreiber's Zus -- contrasting the former's need for a meaningful life with the latter's lust for revenge.

But as he circles such weighty themes -- and not as articulately as you might think -- Zwick never demonstrates more than a fleeting grasp of the material's true breadth.

For all the dreary, authentic Eastern Europe locations, he may as well have helmed this from a classroom.

(This film is rated 14-A)

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