Review of Die Mamba

"Die Mamba" is a German/Austrian co-production from 2014, so two more years until this one has its 5th anniversary. The writer and director is Ali Samadi Ahadi and he made this one in-between his Petterson/Findus films. It runs for 1.5 hours roughly and received a solid deal of awards attention at the Austrian Film Awards. I cannot really see why. i guess it must be because Michael Niavarani is pretty famous there. German audiences get Christoph Maria Herbst, but even if I like Stromberg, I am not sure if this is a good thing as his big screen performance outside his trademark role felt pretty uninspired and frequently also the victim of bad writing. i would say this is true here as well. For the first half of the film he felt really nonexistent almost despite being introduced at the very start of the film. And the turn his character took in the second half never felt realistic at all. Honestly, I'd rather expect him to drink himself to death after his professional struggles and after he was let go other than suddenly joining force with the bad guys. Anyway, this is a comedy about mistaken identities as there are so many from Germany and Niavarani plays a character who is on the one hand a mastermind criminal and on the other a very simple guy and it's not a disguise as I thought early on. It is indeed two character who look like twins. And as for one of the central character being the Mamba, this criminal genius I mentioned, really a lot goes wrong here. The film is mostly about Klamauk (as we say here in Germany) and never about strong story-telling unfortunately. And the worst thing is that hardly any of the jokes are working and for a comedy movie this is of course a negative deal-breaker, especially with the action/crime parts also being relatively underwhelming. All in all, the film fits in well with the great amount of forgettable stuff when it comes to German films from recent years that may have one or two big names to the cast (Julie Englebrecht is somewhat known too I think), but just not a script that makes an impact whatsoever. Or is memorable. A bit of a disappointment as ASA has made films for quite a while now. This must be one of his worst. Watch something else instead.