The plot as a whole is capable of interest - the evil Germans want to make an epidemic in the besieged Leningrad in order to quickly capture it, and the defenders of the city have only three days to prevent them, while frosts stand and the virus cannot spread to its fullest. Even in the title of the film, it is clear that such a story must be dynamic and tense - in just three days you need to find and neutralize saboteurs in a crowded city dying of hunger and cold, while somewhere a few kilometers away the war rages. And you have to be a genius of a bad movie to make it so dull and emotionless! So depressing that it even hurts for such a good story - it deserves a better embodiment on the screen.
A few dynamic scenes are filmed in the spirit of mentov’s series with NTV – the pursuers follow the criminal almost on foot, he can easily get away from them just by turning a corner, and shoot here only in the air (in a military film!). However, what is there should be happy, because instead of dynamics, the film prefers to show us dialogue, interrogations and more dialogue, and then a little more dialogue over a cup of tea, dialogues during a smoke break, dialogues in a destroyed house, dialogues, dialogues, more dialogue for the god of boring films!
Despite the huge amount of dialogue, they do not reveal the characters. They remain some kind of woman, some kind of people in uniform, a bunch of traitors, incomprehensible people in hats ... No matter how hard the writer tries to give them distinctive features and attribute a dark past, they look faded and boring. Like the movie.
There's a couple other things in the movie that are so conspicuous, that they're screaming -- notice me, it's worth celebrating. The first is music. Unique and painfully tragic, it is designed to express those emotions that the characters, due to their faded acting, cannot express. However, music does not cope with this complex matter very well – in some places it looks so out of place that it causes only one emotion – irritation. That's something about the general boredom.
The second is camera work. Atmospheric frames are surprisingly small, in the foreground there is always something murky and out of focus, the camera is constantly shaking. Behind all this you see not the characters and their experiences, not the besieged Leningrad, but the operator who shakes in the car, who runs through the snow, who is tired of carrying a heavy camera in his hands, why it trembles and swings.
The film was disappointing even in the absence of high expectations. The trailer that propelled me to watch promised a dynamic war movie, but Three Days to Spring is closer to the cop series in World War II sets than to war movies. In this genre, our cinema can be better.
3 out of 10
Original