oakbymaple

Complaining in detail about the painfully in-your-face writing, the abscence of any character development, the jarringly wooden dialogue, the ridiculously stenciled acting, the embarassingly obvious low cost music or the fact that a piece of media which at least pretends to be history related is not only pure fiction but also decisively disregardful of its matter would be a waste of time: It's not really an attempt at storytelling or filmmaking but rather a product designed by the numbers to appease the lower instincts of a strictly defined target audience. This is mainly done by the good ol' cheap humiliation of the reverse aggregate of people, of course handing out payoff after payoff without putting in the pesky effort for buildups.

One extra star for the costumes which naturally are ahistorical but also the only corner that wasn't cut .

As a postscript I do recommend scrolling through the reviews here and form your own oppinion on how this kind of reception could have formed a 7.3 rating.

Do you know German movies? They all belong to one of two genres: goofy, forgettable commedy coated in a thick layer of feel-good sugar, or grim drama, depleted of color and prospect. These archetypes draw from a very small pool of themes, which get explored by the ever same characters that are tightly locked to the charged actors. Variation, creativity and the development of new ideas seem to be very unpopular in German cinema, and if you're looking for any of these in movies you might just be out of luck here.

If it just wasn't for this piece: it completely disregards the popular formulae, picks a central idea - or rather question - and relentlessly explores it with no respect to the viewer's expectations.

At the core there are only three characters, who get sent on a journey through post reason capitalism. As the high profile business consultants they are they need to always be on top of everything while their slowly exposed human elements have them stumble into catastrophy with little to no control. The characters' clash and demise is entertaining to watch by itself, not at last due to the clearly involved actors. Yet there is a lot of double flooring that provides good nourishment for thought during and after the movie without pointing fingers or putting forth easy answers.

The open-minded and off-grid approach to telling this story might be taken as overly artsy by some and others will be pushed away by the remaining rough edges that are unavoidable when something is made entirely from scratch. However the boldly presented and and carefully crafted structure of the final product will most likely impress everyone else and maybe even provoke some thought.

In short: a fine movie by itself, but a revelation for German cinema.

The opening is solid and promises a fast paced, cleverly laid out plot with unique characters and a long-term payoff: the reveal of a secret character. What follows sure is fast paced but also laughable in terms of character building and cleverness. Take for instance the final twist, the chararcter reveal: it brags about how insanely clever it is while completely ignoring that it forgot the setup to the payoff. The setup to the main plot point! But it's by no means the only one lacking foreshadowing or at least coherence. Twists and reveals are thematically particularily interesting in a piece on stage magic, but most of the turns come out of complete nowhere, defy any logic and sometimes even invalidate previously, apparently carefully established plot points. Another symptom of this sickness are the "magic tricks", that in a number of cases are just flatout high fantasy literal magic, sometimes poorly explained by throwaway lines or just dumped on the viewer in the hope that the insane frequence of plot turns won't leave any time to ask questions. The characters also fall victim to missing foresight: the initially very intriguing mystery about the four horsemen and their final motivation actually never gets lifted and leaves them as ultimately mindless plot devices. As a result, the amount of cringe in the final two scenes that this mess of a plot culminates in is simply awe-inducing.

There could have been a world of trickery and deception to be playfully explored in the context of professional magicians, but all the movie does is throw the viewer a ton of impossible to chew bones and require them to swallow those with next to no help. All the while bathing itself in its aura of self-proclaimed genius.