Beyond good and evil

The Exception

Crit

So, did you know Kaiser Wilhelm II was still alive in 1940? I didn't, and neither did the titular exception to Nazi nastiness, SS Capt. Stefan Brandt (Jai Courtney), until being assigned to guard the exiled king against a British agent said to be in Holland, presumably to assassinate him. The identity of the agent is clear to the audience in about 3 seconds: it's the beautiful servant Mieke (Lily James). To be fair, it takes a while longer to establish that the SS officer and the (Jewish, as it turns out--when she tells him) Allied spy have fallen in love, truly and deeply.

I suppose someone whose favorite film is Casablanca has no business complaining about a World War II soap opera, but this one is so soapy--it employs just about every cliché of the genre except amnesia and the evil twin. What saves it--barely--from being simply risible is that the aforementioned kaiser is played by Christopher Plummer, his nervously meddling royal consort by Janet McTeer, and--in what must have been fever-dream casting--a Hall of Fame Evil Nazi by the quintessentially nice-guy English schlemiel player Eddie Marsan, absurdly (and accurately) coiffed and absurdly perfect.

The role is that of Heinrich Himmler, who is--as we are explicitly told, twice--the head of the SS. I was inclined to feel insulted until I realized that my ignorance had already been established vis-à-vis the kaiser's still being around.