It’s a strange thing to say about “Defiance,” a gray and blue movie about a group of Belarussian Jewish brothers who escape into the woods and end up hiding out with, ultimately, more than 1,200

others, until the end of World War II, but their experience had to have been more pleasant than what ended up on the screen.

“So we truce and make crappy movie?”

As we’ve seen from the latest James Bond movies, Daniel Craig can handle sharks, naked beatings and the death of a hot babe during a pneumatic nail-gun battle. His weakness as the brooding, indecisive Tuvia, is on full display in “Defiance” — inaction. What little energy his fellow actors have he leeches slowly from them. He can shoot a sole mutineer, but when confronted with a bog to cross, he shuts down completely. If the group’s leadership had really been up to him, at least by the movie’s telling, they would have only differed from the mass graves — found elsewhere in the woods — because of their clothing.

More than 1,200, mostly women, children and the elderly (or what they call “malbushim,” literally “piles of clothes,” meaning roughly unskilled workers), were able to hide in what the History Channel

called a “Jerusalem in the woods” and get to freedom in the end. Tuvia and his brother moved to New York and started a trucking company. One of the women probably lived up to her boast early in the film that when she got out, she would eat nothing but cake forever. But we see little of this sustaining hope, and littler still of the amazing sense of luck the group must have felt to be free, in the forest, able to support and defend themselves. Survivor guilt? Not likely. They seem unaware of what’s going on outside their patch of woods.

At least someone’s horrified by his trigger control.

Early on in the movie, Tuvia says of the Germans, “we must not become like them.” But the movie is dishonest — has to be dishonest — about how similar those in the forest appear to be to their peers,

imprisoned in other movies of the Holocaust genre. The grim toils we see in the movie could not have possibly beat down the inhabitants’ spirits in any way close to the way their countrymen were destroyed in the not so far away camps and ghettoes of Europe.

No doubt the intentional and unintentional rebels in the Lipiczanska forest found snorting laughter, snotty weeping, reeling drunkenness, sour and rotten sickness and sexual congress among the pine needless as they built their tannery, their court, their schoolhouse and their cow pastures in reality. But in the movie, neither the vodka, nor the women, nor the fresh air or the birdsong brings relief. That’s no defiance, no rebellion, no freedom. Even Anne Frank, tip-toeing around a few square feet of attic in Amsterdam, wrote of an occasional thrill of wild joy — one almost entirely missing from “Defiance.”

“Defiance” is sadly, disappointingly, not nearly as entertaining or amazing as it could have been, sort of a half-baked Lifetime movie for men. It’s not quite a cheer-for-the-good-guys popcorn picture or a

haunting and evocative movie about man’s injustice to man. Instead of plucking whole the ripest bits of unfabricatable reality and adding the cinematic sparkle — a camera’s swoop or few second’s lingering — it’s more, well, similar to a pile of dirty clothes.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in the theater anymore. She lives in North Hollywood, near the In-N-Out Burger.