Run Lola Run, a review by Jon
Run Lola Run2 out of 5
Time is running out for Lola. She's just received a frantic phone call from her boyfriend Manni, who's lost a small fortune in cash belonging to his Mob boss. Now, she has to run for his life, to try and come up with the money before Manni pays the ultimate price for his mistake.I remember this film being a lot of fun and it still is, but bloody hell it’s dated. It seems to get taken rather seriously too, which I don’t quite understand. It’s a childish premise, stretched way past breaking point and has a very strange moral centre.
The plot is simply Lola (Franke Potente) getting a call from her drug-dealing, mobster wannabe boyfriend. He’s been a prat and left 100,000 marks on a subway and a tramp has taken it. He will soon be killed by his mobster boss if he can’t replace it. So, Lola has 20 minutes to find the money (her banker father is the obvious choice) and get to Manni before he makes a foolhardy attempt to hold up the local supermarket. The sequence repeats three times, complete with flashy animation inserts, a thumping soundtrack and incidental musings on life as Lola tries different routes to the solution.
Groundhog Day, basically.
So it has this philosophical view of life and death, and how fate works and how we do the right thing at the right time. Or something. Now it’s still much better than the similar pretentious sequence in
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but my problems with it are thus:
Manni is a petty criminal who wants to be a proper criminal when he grows up. The money is from a drug deal. His first thought for a solution is to rob a supermarket. Because he has a gun and he’s a criminal. Am I being thick or something, but why the hell am I supposed to sympathise with his situation? It seems morally at odds with this fancy Buddhist notion of little things affecting big things and Lola’s Zen like ability to rewind time, narratively speaking (and later, save a heart attack victim by holding his hand). Letting Manni get killed and seeing how Lola handles it, with her sense of fate and reason for living, would have been much more interesting.
I might sound two-faced, after all some of the best films are about anti-heroes with questionable ethics, but the character is written as being an affable, misguided young chap, whom Lola loves beyond anything. And the film makes no effort to show him the error of his ways. No redemption. This is not
Bonnie and Clyde or even Pumpkin and Honey Bunny from
Pulp Fiction, which allowed them to succeed with irony.
The other problem I have, is that when Lola finally does succeed (sorry, should that be a spoiler?), what the hell did she actually do? The plot is self-serving. The only reason the first two attempts don’t work is because of her. In the end, the only thing she really does is the heart attack guy. And what’s with all the damn screaming to break glass? It’s all flash and no thunder.
Then again, while it is flashy and self-serving to point of being pointless, it’s very well done and cinematic, especially in how the heroine looks so wild and forms a natural contrast, almost like a costumed super-hero. The soundtrack is likeable if you like that sort of thing, the actors are very good and it’s concisely well-written with some nice banter. The absolute ace is Potente. Her look is striking, though strangely attractive and her delivery is excellent.
Whether it is actually any good, despite being watchable, depends entirely on your own take. I thought it was over-done bollocks.
(From Jon's Alphabet Marathon 2010 on July 17th, 2010)
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September 21, 2023, 11:14:07 AM
