Horst in Translation ([email protected])
"Heil" is a German comedy movie from this summer and it deals with the eternal issue of Nazis and how to deal with them still existing. It runs for slightly over 100 minutes and was written and directed by Dietrich Brüggemann. The last film he made before this one was "Kreuzweg", a tale about a deeply religious young girl and it was a brilliant piece, so my expectations for this one here were high, maybe too high as this one here is a completely different topic and genre. The cast includes Benno Fürmann, Liv Lisa Fries, Andreas Dresen, Michael Gwisdek and Jacob Matschenz. Of course there are many more in the cast, but these are the ones I am familiar with, even if some of these only have a very small role and appear in no more than one or two scenes.I believe that the first half hour and the last 15 minutes are the best thing about this movie. The middle part wasn't really that strong. It seems like it is all about a Black guy being hit to the head and then repeating everything he hears. As a consequence, a trio of Nazis use him to promote their ideas and help in making a German invasion to Poland happen. Unfortunately, this plot gets old so quickly and is really only a very minor thing as the film goes on. Maybe Brüggemann realized that it got repetitive quickly and we also should not forget that Fürmann is a much bigger star than the guy who played the Black main character, so of course Fürmann would become the lead actor in the second half of the film. I never thought he was a great actor though and this film did not change my perception of his talent. However, the scenes with Fries and Bröcker very much elevated the material and these two were fun to watch in their scenes together. The idea with apparently everybody having a crush on the Nazi girl wasn't bad either. Actually this was the only real motivation for the Poland invasion.A major criticism in this film is that it sometimes loses focus and to me just felt like a collection of snippets that hardly have anything to do with each other anymore. As if it was a comedy show with several scenes. They may get a laugh here and there through that, but it really hurt the flow of the film. There were also many insignificant scenes in here. The whole film could have been 20 minutes shorter in my opinion. The photographer guy added nothing in my opinion, and the two henchmen to Fürmann's character were almost as insignificant as Fürmann's character's Nazi antagonist from another city. And if it was a satire that is also against Nazis, they made one crucial mistake. The moment they let the Nazis shoot people randomly, like the gun nut or the dog lady, these are not necessarily Nazis anymore, but murdering psychopaths, which is one step too many. It's fine to make fun of them, but this takes it too far in my opinion.All in all, it was an okay movie. I probably would have only given it 4 stars without the last 15 minutes, including the funny epilogue with everybody being together. These were pretty chaotic, but also pretty fun to watch and made me forget about some of the previous flaws. It has a touch of Tarantino with all the Nazis dying here. A solid film overall, but you can only enjoy it for its absurdity as there is no credible foundation here in terms of drama or interpersonal relationships.
