Hurricane Review: Iwan Rheon Impresses In WWII Drama

Rating: 3/5

You'd be hard-pressed to find any story from the second world war that has been so overlooked and is so badly needed as that of No. 303 Polish Fighter Squadron. There's a good chance you've never even heard of the outfit, despite them being the most successful unit in the Battle Of Britain with a stunning success rate in dogfights and despite how key they were to helping repel the German invasion of Britain.

Their story was one buried in the wake of the second world war, thanks to an agenda to appease Communist leader Stalin and the British nation's unfeasible lack of gratitude for their service. They should have been welcomed as conquering heroes, exalted as a propaganda-maker's dream for their killcounts and their inefficiency, but the sad reality was that the majority of British people wanted them to be repatriated after the war.

The sad ending to that story - again, which hasn't been told nearly enough on film - is that they returned home and faced persecution, despite actively seeking a means to fight for their homeland in the service of a completely different country. They deserved monuments to their achievements, but they were swept under the carpet.

Director David Blair - making Rakuten's first movie - has made Hurricane as a means to address that injustice. Admitting his initial reluctance to make "just another" war film when the script landed with him, Blair was compelled to film the story because of how little he knew about it and how important it seems.

For that task, he's assembled a solid cast, including Game Of Thrones' Iwan Rheon, Milo Gibson (the seventh son of Mel), Czech actor Krystof Hadek and Stefanie Martini. Bar Rheon, none will be too recognisable and nor will the majority of the polish actors playing the parts of the 303 themselves, but that fits with this story's strange mystery.

Rheon is great as firebrand pilot Jan Zumbach, who is the top gun of the piece and as close as we get to a real hero and his performance - which takes in some of the intensity of Ramsay Bolton but with more of Theon Greyjoy's haunted vulnerability in there. And the fact that he speaks Polish in there (very well, it has to be said) despite learning it PHONETICALLY, is just astonishing, really.

Alongside him, Martini plays a strong, fearsome woman very much living in defiance of the traditional image of women in this sort of film. She's determined to achieve her own goals, not afraid of standing up to toxic masculinity and in charge of her own story - it's very refreshing. She's one of the film's real outsider sort of characters - though, they all are really - and so too is Milo Gibson's Kent, who leads and trains the squadron and goes from struggling to get them to obey him to being one of them. Gibson's solid performance allows for more emotional performances elsewhere, but the restraint is certainly admirable.

The film used the last working Hurricane in existence for some of the flight sequences and also incorporated real footage from gun-mounted cameras from the squadron, which adds a stark reminder that this was very much a real story. It speaks a truth that should have been spoken a lot more.

It's not the highest-budget film and some of the effects work is somewhat limited, but what Blair achieves with his budget and the emotion of the story transcends any limitations. And more than anything, you get the sense that this story deserves to be told and that these heroes - as flawed and as human as they were (which comes across in the character dynamic between them all - deserve to be commemorated.

And to that end, it's a worthy watch that adds something to a wider narrative that is already well told elsewhere. If that's the agenda that the new Rakuten project is looking at - giving a platform to voices not able to find them elsewhere necessarily - they've definitely started as they should look to go on.

Hurricane is set for release on September 7th.

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