Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven’s early made-in-Holland films, like 1973’s “Turkish Delight” and 1980’s “Spetters,” were crafted with an export-friendly commercial intelligence that earned their director a ticket to the Hollywood blockbuster big time. Dark humored, self-consciously over-the-top American pictures like “Robo-Cop,” “Total Recall,” and “Basic Instinct” have since earned Mr. Verhoeven a string of seven-figure paychecks and a cult following that has survived critical drubbing and the occasional box office disaster like the woeful (or camp classic, depending on your tastes) paradigm of 1990s Hollywood big budget sleaze, “Showgirls.”

“Black Book,” the first Dutch project Mr. Verhoeven has undertaken since 1983’s “The Fourth Man,” reunites the director with Gerard Soeteman, the screenwriter of “The Fourth Man” and most of Mr. Voerhoven’s pre-Hollywood outings. It also brings Mr. Voerhoven back to a subject he explored firsthand as a child and previously onscreen in the 1979 art house import hit “Soldier of Orange” — the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during World War II.

As “Black Book” begins, Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten) is a schoolteacher in a front-line Kibbutz in 1950s Israel. But a voice from the past calls her name, the years peel away, and we are reintroduced to Rachel on a very different farm in rural Holland, where she impatiently waits out the Nazi occupation while dreaming of resuming her successful singing career.

Cruel fate in the form of an errant Allied bomb intervenes and Rachel is forced to make arrangements to escape into Allied territory. Mr. Smaal (Dolf de Vries), an attorney apparently sympathetic to the plight of Rachel, her family, and other Dutch Jews, organizes a surreptitious nighttime canal boat passage. But the Steins and the rest of their party are ambushed by Nazi soldiers. Rachel escapes, but only after enduring the sight of her family’s slaughter and the theft of the cash and jewelry that Smaal pointedly insisted they would need in their new home.

Emboldened by a desire for revenge and with nothing left to lose, Rachel joins the Dutch Resistance. The partisans make full use of her performing talents and abundant physical charisma on a series of missions involving Allied supply airdrops, transportation of vital correspondence, and other boilerplate World War II resistance issues.

On one of these adventures, Rachel saves both her skin and the day by flirting with a high-ranking Nazi officer. When the son of the leader of Rachel’s resistance cell is captured, Rachel beds the officer in hopes of finding a way to rescue her compatriots. But even in the vividly ugly world of opportunism and hypocrisy Mr. Vehoeven evokes in “Black Book,” love is possible. Unfortunately for Rachel, and nearly every other character in the film, one particularly star-crossed romance develops and a hornets’ nest of resulting betrayals ensues.

As in Mr. Verhoeven’s other Dutch-language films, the performances in “Black Book” are exuberant and fearless. Nazi thugs sadistically lick their lips as sparkleeyed young Dutch patriots (and quislings) courageously part theirs. But as in Mr. Verhoeven’s American films, there is a campy ridiculousness that creeps into the story and takes its toll as the film wears on. Lithe, clear-eyed, and understated, Ms. van Houten nearly prevails in the face of increasingly contrived stakes and unmotivated double-crosses.

Mr. Verhoeven maintains that “Black Book” is a dream project whose script he and Mr. Soeteman have been perfecting for four decades. It’s unfortunate that during those years they weren’t able to iron out some of the more convoluted plotting eccentricities that betray logic from the film’s first half hour. One can’t help but wonder why the film clocks in at 145 minutes, since the identity of two of the three culprits in Rebecca’s parents’ murder is patently clear for most of the running time. Could not a labored scene that takes place well after the two-hour mark depicting liberated Dutch citizens dunking a woman in human excrement been saved for the DVD extras?

In “Black Book,” Mr. Verhoeven weaves the time and marketplace-tested sex-religion-death art house symbolism he mastered in his native films with the bewildering action sequences, superficial characterization, and glossy voyeurism he practiced in Hollywood. The result is a film that is nowhere near as repulsive as, say, “Hollow Man,” but also nowhere near as entertaining as “Soldier of Orange.”