This turned out to be a decent movie overall; it's not the cheesy action flick I was expecting. It goes in the drama-suspense category...and it's "inspired by a true story," whatever that means. A terrorist with a bomb strapped to him walks into Patsy Kensit's elementary-school class, takes them hostage, and demands 50 million marks for their release. Jürgen is a detective who's put in charge of the situation.
The authorities don't want to hand the money over, of course, and they end up deciding to pretend to get the ransom ready; Jürgen is told to come up with a plan to get everybody out of the classroom without actually delivering the dough. The bulk of the film is a combination of Patsy dealing with the terrorist and the kids mixed with scenes of Jürgen supervising the rescue operation. He gets them all out safely, of course.
This thing had one big problem: it's a bad movie for 40 minutes before it turns into a good movie. It's slow, and they do a lousy job with character development. Jürgen shows up about 20 minutes into it, and even after 20 minutes with him in it I became tempted to start using the fast-forward button. I resisted, and the film immediately picked up after that. My notes until that point consisted of:
- Patsy gets top billing over Jürgen #$%$#^&*!
- Patsy's acting still sucks
- so does everybody else's in this movie until the guy
playing the other teacher shows up
- it's been 25 minutes and all I know so far is that
Patsy is a young widow with a baby who's moved to
Germany from Los Angeles
- Jürgen is driving a Mercedes
- Jürgen's eyes look beautiful (when I start
writing down this kind of crap, you know there's a problem).
Then all of a sudden the story got moving and everything improved, including Patsy's acting - I thought a lot better of her by the time it was over, but she still ain't no Glenn Close. I didn't like Jürgen up until that point either, as he had too much speechy dialog to recite. Once it got past that stage, he was great. It was one of those roles where it would have been easy to just chew the scenery, but he didn't do that.
Plus the character was doing neat stuff. I don't know how much of the "true story" ended up in the film, but I'm guessing Germany is not the place to pull a terrorist stunt like that. Those cops had some serious technology and skill at their immediate disposal, and they knew what to do with it too.
I also suggest that you suck up to your local politicians so they'll pay the ransom if you ever get kidnapped. They'd always rather let people get killed than pay up.
i don't know if you got the last msg i sent... i said be nice to The Human Bomb, but i meant be nice to jürgen. it's mostly a good movie. (uh... good for a jürgen movie? good for a jürgen-and-patsy movie??)
and remember i am in love with gerhardt whether the movie sucks or not, so don't hurt me. ;P
I'll be nice to HB...it was the best of the three...Jürgen in a tux... Jürgen looking worried...I just needed him wet for a perfect film.
And there were lots of little ho's in training (the bratty children)... I liked that.
Some of Jürgen's speeches were a bit over the top....way too noble. I think I like him either as a real baddy or a world-weary schlub.... he was too much a tru-blue hero for me.
I want my Jürgen wet and soul-tortured. But hey..I like it...I like it!
yeah, the speeches bothered me at first but then they seemed to get past all the "explaining" scenes so he didn't have to just stand there and recite... and i thought it was fine after that. i got a major kick out of seeing jürgen as a NICE guy squashing morons just by yelling at 'em. he should get more roles like that.
way too noble? nah... i could have done without the body-armor thing at the end, but i believed him when he talked about the olympics and said he was going to go in after the bomber personally. maybe the lines weren't so hot, but honestly i wasn't paying attention to the script at that point. i was just watching jürgen being fabulous.
if it was a too-noble role at least he played it through without doing any posturing, bless his heart... for which reason it looked to me like a world-weary schlub role as much as anything else. the character was awfully aggravated the whole time and he wasn't trying to impress anybody, just do the job right despite being surrounded by idiots. they could easily have shown that guy chain-smoking, gulping coffee, and popping aspirin every 10 minutes. if they had done that and had the water sprinklers go off on him when the smoke bomb exploded, you'd have had your wet and (more blatantly) world-weary schlub - and you'd have majorly loved the whole thing.
need i point out that this is why we should be writing jürgen's scripts?
I WANT SEQUELS.
i want a gerhardt tv series.
jürgen was wet and soul-tortured in The Other Side of the Law. so that's your favorite jürgen movie now next to Das Boot?
yes, i am going to pick on you about that until you lose your mind.
Let us not bring up TOSOTL anymore....please, I beg of you.
ok, ok, Gerhardt was a hero, a noble guy, a sweetie telling off slimy politicos...I love him...let's have a mini-series of COPS starring Jürgen as Gerhardt.
Happy now??
almost... but you made me hurt myself laughing, so... TOSOTL! TOSOTL! TOSOTL!!!
[I had to be careful picking the photos for this one. I like Jürgen's performance in this an awful lot - better every time I see it, actually. It has an appeal that's difficult to articulate, except to say I've never seen him in another role where he was so authoritative, competent, and yet relaxed at the same time, despite the tense situation around which the story was built. One thing's for sure: if I ever get into trouble, I'd want somebody exactly like Gerhardt around to get me out of it.
The results of the photo session made me wonder what on earth had ever made me think ANYbody was any good in this, especially Jürgen. He made every face in the book. It was fabulous. I chose the calmer expressions for the photo page so as not to lead anyone astray. I've seen the movie a few times and never once thought Jürgen was doing any overacting at any point, and I'm not changing my mind about it now. Gerhardt is a rather emotional role, and one of the best things about Jürgen's acting is his ability to be really animated without flailing around looking silly. He yells a lot in this movie, but it's so beautifully controlled that he's a real delight to watch here. Not to name names, but there are some actors out there who should watch this one and take notes. -ed.]