Rating: D+
Dir: Tobias Obentheuer
Star: Jessica Stautz, Max Ranft, Jennifer Karen, René Rüprich
From the poster below, you’ll understand why I thought I might get a review out of this for GirlsWithGuns.org. By its presence here, you will know that, in fact, I did not. Indeed, I gave serious though simply to not bothering at all, and pretending the entire experience did not take place. It was just so blandly uninteresting, wasting all its potential. There’s a lot of “Previously on…” here, to the point that, in the early going, I wondered if this was a sequel to a film I’d never seen. It isn’t: though had it been, it would likely have caused me to pull the plug on the feeble endeavour, and consequently been a blessing in disguise.
Let me quote the opening, because I am lazy. “Eight years ago, the ruthless energy company YTEON managed to open a time void in the ruins of Saint Quartier. This makes it possible to exchange information between the present and the past. But the unstable experiment failed and cost countless researchers and civilians their lives in the cruelest way possible. The unstable entrance could not be completely closed again, and has since posed a threat to the world as we know it. Five years later, a student from Germany, Alexander Michalski, by chance found a locked ancient book. The Book of Time, as YTEON called it, seems connected to these events and is now, three years later, our last hope to undo the course of events.”
I would like to watch that movie. This one, not so much. Police detective Carolin Arends (Stautz) stumbles across a piece of evidence in an old case, and consequently opens a can of worms, because much of the case information has been repressed. She and her partner Thomas (Ranft) dig into the case, which involves the unsolved murder of Michalski, only to find that others have an interest in ensuring the case is not re-opened. Among these, for obvious reasons is the murderer, although in typically law-abiding Teutonic fashion, after kidnapping Carolin, he does little more than give her a stern warning not to try and catch him, before letting her go. Germany: where even the killers are pussies. Mind you, it does reduce her to a whimpering wreck, so the same must go for German cops.
Oh, and remember the concept of the time void? Exchanging information with the past? Because the movie certainly doesn’t. The myriad of interesting ways in which such a mechanism could be used, are never explored. Instead, we’re watching boring, not particularly competent Carolin doing entry-level police work. When she and Thomas eventually decide to put their careers on the line and break into YTEON, it’s proves an all-you-can-eat buffet of “Is that it?” Not least because the evil corporation, capable of suppressing “countless” deaths, has about three (3) employees, and no real ongoing activity to speak of. We reach the end, nothing has particularly been resolved, and I couldn’t care less.