The story is extraordinary, all the more so because it is true. In 1941, three farming brothers, Jewish Poles, took refuge in the dense woods of Belarus near the Novogrudok ghetto as the Nazi occupiers massacred their compatriots by the thousand.

They not only learned how to stay alive but fought the German patrols and their collaborators and raided their old homes to mete out revenge.
By the end of the war they had established a community of survivors numbering well over 1,000.
So much for the persistent theory that the Jews did nothing to fight back.

In Edward Zwick’s film, based on Nechama Tec’s moving book of the same name, Daniel Craig — taking time off from playing James Bond — Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell take the parts of the brothers, fierce rivals at times but determined somehow to survive.

It is an unorthodox cast — probably an attempt to increase the box office value of yet another holocaust story.

What doesn’t work is Zwick’s pedestrian telling of the tale. It is not aided by a very ordinary screenplay from Zwick and Clay Frohman and by direction which constantly puts one in mind of an old fashioned Second World War thriller that happens to star Jewish heroes rather than John Wayne or Errol Flynn.

Even so, Craig as Tuvia, the reluctant but eventually dictatorial leader of the group, who had himself lost his wife and infant daughter, demonstrates that 007 only partly shows off his talents. And both Schreiber, as the brother hooked on revenge rather than survival, and Bell, as the youngest sibling, emotionally caught between the two, seem like real people rather than actors.

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Defiance remains a fantastic story. No one could doubt the sincerity of its telling. What Defiance lacks is simply an ability to make it come fully alive.