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.