Max Manus

Starring Aksel Hennie. In Norwegian with English subtitles. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, April 2, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

The real-life hero of Max Manus led a small band of Norwegian resistance fighters responsible for sinking German troop ships and severing rail lines at critical times in the Second World War. And he survived to write several bestselling books, upon which this expensive, handsomely mounted movie was based.

It’s fortunate that codirectors Joachim Rí¸nning and Espen Sandberg can handle this kind of scope. (Remarkably, their previous collaboration was the Mexican action comedy Bandidas, with Salma Hayek and Penélope Cruz.) And in Aksel Hennie, who plays our haunted hero between the ages of 25 and 30, they have a genuine star. Hennie resembles a young James Spader, with some Steve Buscemi around the edges, and he supplies a lot of the chutzpah only implied by first-timer Thomas Nordseth-Tiller’s straightforward script.

In 1940, Max has just returned to Oslo from the Finnish border with the Soviet Union, where he volunteered to fight Russians in the short Winter War. We occasionally return to his memories of combat, and there are perhaps too many flashbacks in a film already burdened by scenes of commando training in Scotland, elaborate sabotage at home, and several escapes to Sweden, including a rather vaguely drawn affair with a Norwegian contact (Agnes Kittelsen) in Stockholm. There is also cat-and-mouse stuff with a charmingly vicious Gestapo chief played by Germany’s Ken Duken, with shades of Christoph Waltz’s Inglourious Basterds turn.

Obviously, there’s no time for the side trips Max actually took to Russia, Turkey, South Africa, and the United States in the same period. There’s only so much you can pack into two hours, and if the movie suffers from fragmentation (and a tad too much hand-held camera), the emphasis remains on suspense and camaraderie rather than on the violence of war.