Böse Wetter (2016) Reviews

• George yes, the rest not really

  Horst_In_Translation2018-10-07

  Here we have the German movie "Böse Wetter" that runs like pretty much every other German small screen release for exactly 1.5 hours and the title is a term from the mining industry about dangerous gases released down there and has nothing to do with weather as I thought initially. Tough to translate this way. Anyway, with Götz George you get one of the German acting heavyweights from the last 50 years in here and this was indeed his final movie before his death which still makes me a bit sad as I have a great deal of respect for the man. It was released on October 3rd 2016, a German holiday, so a bit more then 2 years ago now. At that point, George had already been dead for a while. The other two more known names in the cast we have here are Landgrebe (not her only film with George) and Matthias Koeberlin. I am not sure if he is lead actor material, even if he is solid most of the time. The film early on looks a bit like a movie about an environment scandal or about a tragedy down in the mines and why it happened and this would have fit the kind of films you usually see Koeberlin in, but eventually the movie takes a completely different direction. Not a very good one either though. German history, in the sense of GDR and Stasi, get included, but only feel for the sake of it most of the time and this heavy subject here never makes the emotional impact it should have. Perhaps it would have been a better decision for director Johannes Grieser to write the script himself too. I also thought the atmospheric component here came very short as the claustrophobic factor from these dark mines down there really could have made this a far better watch. Instead they include the most generically predictable story line about the boy being in danger in the mines at the end and everybody (especially the two "heroes") out to save him while risking their own lives and in the process of this cooperation they overcome their struggles with each other involving the young man's father's death. Oh well, at least they did not go for the explanation that George's character is his actual dad which seemed like an option for a while. Still, even if the negative is more frequent, this wasn't a bad film. You could see George was aging hard at that point and perhaps he was sick already, but he still has great screen presence and his line delivery and physical acting are as good as ever. Shame the writing all in all is not on par with his skills. The over-the-top happy ending is not helping matters either. And still I would say the last half hour is the best of the movie because it is somewhat dramatic, though never really deep, while almost everything before that felt overlong, bland and plain uninteresting. A bit of a pity. I think there was potential for a much better film here with a better script. The only aspect I somewhat liked was the explanation that the kid gave the flight plans away back then that eventually resulted in tragedy. But it just wasn't enough for me to give this one a positive recommendation. The fact that it is still probably a better film than most other German small screen releases these days (especially the horrible Tatort series) only says how bad everything else is, not that this one here is a good watch. Go for something else instead. Even I as a George admirer was disappointed, maybe also because his screen time is not that much. It's Koeberlin's (character's) movie. Watch something else instead. Rest in peace Götz.