thomas4cinema

It depends a bit on your movie experience and your geographical origin how long you can enjoy this movie: After 20 minutes at the very latest, you will have figured out that something is very fishy about the plot – if you ever saw an insomnia-based thriller before, it will probably only take you 16 minutes to realize that something is off and what exactly it is. After that, you may like car chases, this gets you through another 10 minutes or so – only that those 10 minutes come much later. Ideally, you have never seen a movie before, and you are from Berlin. Then there is a chance that you are sufficiently entertained by the plot and by the way Berlin is depicted in a certain cold war style (snowy, cold… just the way it is most of the year). For the rest of us, there is Bruno Ganz and the Stasi character he plays to be happy about (and yes, he did go out “very well”), and the fact that they are blowing up the Adlon Hotel and that everything seems to take place in Friedrichstrasse – but that brings it back to Berlin Folklore again… I was not terribly bored, but terribly annoyed that for a twist-driven thriller, there is not a single surprising twist (with one minor exception), and that the script authors believe this was all original.