Harms (2013)

Professional criminal Harms (Heiner Lauterbach) gets out of jail after the usual fourteen, fifteen year span movies use in these cases. He’s getting bored rather quickly with sitting around and having sex with prostitute Jasmin (Valentina Sauca) who appears inexplicably fond of him.

So he’s taking an opportunity to get back into the game, when a not at all dubious character (Friedrich von Thun), invites him into handling a big armed robbery for him.

Harms grabs some members of his old crew, some hacker dude his shady partner finds, and goes to work. The planning phase is made difficult by a variety of problems, most of which need to be resolved by violence, and the actual robbery does feature some sudden and inevitable betrayal.

Which isn’t a spoiler, because prime among the weaknesses of Nikolai Müllerschön’s Harms is a script that feels the need to include every gangster and heist movie cliché ever seen in a movie while putting very little effort into properly connecting them. It’s not as if I expect originality from this sort of affair, but some care, focus, and judicious excision of superfluous side business would have done wonders here.

That might also have cut down the cast of characters to a number Müllerschön could actually handle – as it stands, there are a lot of characters in the movie who aren’t terribly important, and quite a few actors who seem unprepared for the kind of naturalistic tough guy acting the film clearly asks for. In typical German overcompensation, the dialogue often tries rather too hard for tough guy strong language in ways that feel ridiculous instead of believable – it’s not just that nobody would be talking this way, it’s that nobody involved manages to convince they indeed are.

Lauterbach is pretty good, though, apparently enjoying the opportunity to break many of the rules of German screen acting and work more via physical presence than overenunciation.

From time to time, the film manages to get up to a good scene or two, but its lack of focus prevents Harms from capitalizing on this enough to become a good movie. Or really, to become more than a series of scenes.

Der Skorpion (1997)

Josef Berthold (the inexplicably popular-in-Germany at the time Heiner Lauterbach) heads an anti-drug crime department of Munich police. He’s rather on the zealous side, so his relationships with his wife Lili (Renate Krößner) and his insufferable late teenage son Robin (Marek Harloff) are increasingly strained.

For the local drug lords, Josef is just too damn successful. In what appears to be an attempt to demonstrate certain dangers to him, Lili is drugged in a restaurant and nearly dies in an accident caused by her state. This doesn’t exactly suggests a reason for backing down to Josef. Rather, he’s now out for blood instead of putting people behind bars; at the same time, his relationship with Marek further deteriorates.

Marek flees into a rather sudden relationship with a porn actress (Birge Schade), drugs, and general teenage raging.

While that’s going on, someone appears to begin killing their way up the chain of the local drug business, particularly the parts most probably connected to the attack on Lili. Josef would be the obvious suspect here.

The films of Dominik Graf, with their often somewhat crazed intensity, their intense, rough, brilliant 35mm camera work and their love for maximalist low budget genre filmmaking are a curious fit for German TV, yet still, he’s been making this sort of thing for decades and is somehow still at it, even getting a good number of German TV prizes for material these things would typically not take a second look at. Hell, he even managed to smuggle a very late, nearly perfect giallo into the world of German crime TV in 2011 in  form of the astonishing “Polizeiruf 110” Cassandras Warnung.

This much earlier TV movie made for the ZDF (Germany’s second public TV channel) is Graf at his most intense, featuring a plot that includes general crime business, a giallo-esque serial killing (with a totally not giallo-esque solution), many highly improbable random turns, and heightened family melodrama. Added to this is the most teenage scenery chewing ever to chew scenery by Marek Harloff - who manages to be so improbably annoying his extremity makes him feel like a real teenager again or rather like all of them at once - gratuitous sex and nudity, highly effective suspense sequences, and sudden bursts of quiet nearly as intense as the film’s breathless loudness. It’s as if a bit of worthy, bland German crime TV had been bitten by a radioactive Italian filmmaker or possessed by the ghosts of certain 70s attempts at establishing a German genre film (something Graf made two documentaries about).

It’s the visual and narrative energy that holds this whole thing made out of disparate parts together, a willingness to just follow through with weird ideas, but also Graf’s skill with every disparate part taken separately: he can do the melodrama, the thriller, the arthouse coming of age, the German cop show business, and appears to never have heard you’re not supposed to do them all at once. I’m certainly not going to disagree with the man.