But for a movie with so many chases, gunfights and tank battles, T-34 is pretty boring and mostly bloodless. In his fueled-up fighting vehicle, Ivushkin manages to kill a bunch of Germans before getting captured along with his crew.ĭo the brave, self-sacrificing Russians ultimately escape their prison camp with one of Russia's most advanced T-34 tanks and a comely Russian woman in tow? Does moustache-twirling Nazi tank commander Klaus Jäger, played by German actor Vinzenz Kiefer, give chase in his own tank?ĭo the Russian and German tanks fight a pitched final battle while racing toward each other across a bridge? Do tank shells fly in slow motion? Does the villain fall to his death in his ruined tank, just like the bad guy does in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? The film slows to Matrix-style bullet time, as it often will do over the next 139 minutes, and Ivushkin twists the steering wheel to literally dodge the supersonic shell. Just one more German tank stands between him and his own armored vehicle. When we meet him, Ivushkin is behind the wheel of a rickety truck, speeding through German lines with a precious cargo of fuel for his tank. The Germans are pushing toward Moscow, out-maneuvering and out-gunning the brave and doomed Russian defenders. Heart-throb actor Alexander Petrov plays Nikolay Ivushkin, a fearless Russian tank commander on World War II's Eastern Front. T-34 is indeed Fast & Furious with tanks. T-34 glamorizes a strain of militaristic, backward-looking nationalism that the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin is counting on to mobilize "real" Russians against their "fascist" enemies, a list that includes gays, feminists, Western Europeans and anyone who dares to challenge Putin's generational grip on power. By American standards the published numbers are extremely, indeed implausibly, low: the budget for the first Fast & Furious film, for example, was $38 million, the most recent, $190 million.įor this movie, government sponsorship is not only apparent, it's the point.
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