Cheesy stuff from Disney

Disney and nazism are probably two things that should never go together. Add in kids fighting the powers that be by belting out jazz hits and you just encourage added cringing. I could see the earnest intention in “Swing Kids”, a film that tries to portray what it was like for teenagers in the early years of WW2, but overall it just feels manipulative.


Owing quite a bit to “Newsies”, “Swing Kids” were a group of teens in Hamburg, Germany who wore their hair long and were very much into American and British culture, especially swing music, in defiance of joining the Hitler youth. Apparently, they also adopted flawless American accents as opposed to German speaking adults, or was that just so American teens watching the film could identify with them better?


Friends Peter (Robert Sean Leonard) and Thomas (Christian Bale) spend their nights dancing and singing lyrics to the likes of Benny Goodman and Count Basie. They are not particularly political but that all changes when Peter is picked up for stealing and plopped into the Nazi Gestapo. Thomas soon follows along to keep tabs on his friend.


They both think they can remain immune to the Nazi propaganda, instead using the swastika on their arm to roam around more freely while still continuing to be Swing Kids at night. It’s not that they are indifferent to the raids, beatings, and killings being carried out by the Nazis, they just don’t think they can stop it and would prefer to remain out of it.


But as one of their other friends points out, doing nothing is the same as complicity and this seems to spur the two boys on in different ways. Both can look to their fathers as examples of the men they’d like to be- Peter’s defied Hitler all the way up to the point where men came and took him away one night, Thomas’ is an abusive asshole and Nazi supporter.


The film looks at youth having to make big choices: ones that determine the kind of men they’ll become, the kind of country they want to live in, and that turn friend against friend.


That’s the good part. The rest of it, and sadly the part it seems Disney seemed most interested in, is turning the film into a cheesy “Footloose” clone. Rather than explain what’s happening politically, the film loves its youth standing up to oppression message. It also loves dance and bellowing out “It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing” like it’s a protest song. The worst is “swing heil!”, which the kids shout continuously and becomes the hilarious ending’s rallying cry.


For all noble intention the film is still a dog. Director Thomas Carter gives it a lethargic pace and an all too obvious sense of where this is all going. There’s no suspense and the actors can only do a serviceable job of going through the motions. Only Kenneth Branagh, as a Gestapo officer who takes an interest in Peter, becomes all that interesting. Otherwise this was just a swing and a miss.