These shifts from sugary to shocking are jarring. Yet though Barbie’s operatic violence leans perilously close to parody, Schweighöfer’s urbane-monster routine is wickedly diverting. Much more so than watching our halfhearted hero moon over his gentle crush, Emma (an affecting Clémence Poésy), or teach the orphans to hide by climbing trees. An encounter on a train between the two men — Marceau, now a member of the French resistance, is evacuating children to the Alps — owes the entirety of its suspense to Schweighöfer’s flickering changes of expression. He would have been superb in silent movies.

Bracketed by weirdly redundant scenes of Marceau being celebrated by General George S. Patton (Ed Harris) and his troops, “Resistance” feels disjointed and dated. Lukewarm romantic subplots play like cursory afterthoughts, inserted to pander to audience expectations, and supporting characters are confusingly ill-defined and disconnected from one another. There is no doubt that Marceau’s wartime exploits — he was also a gifted forger who would go on to work with U.S. intelligence services — deserve a biopic. This one, though, is too uncomfortably torn between his comic talents and the horrors against which they were deployed.

Resistance

Rated R for multiple atrocities. Running time: 2 hours. Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play, YouTube and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.