Schimanski was such a successful character in the long running Tatort series that in the eighties he was granted two outings in the cinema. The adavantage was of course a much larger budget but with both films that didn't really translate into quality. They had the money to have Joe Cocker do the title song but had it written by third rate hacks (except for Klaus Lage) that make Dieter Bohlen sound like Mozart. Essentially, the weakest point of both films is the writing. Zabou doesn't really have much of a story but more an excuse for a string of car chases and fight scenes. Maybe the director should not have asked his brother to write the screenplay. It's preditable and a good writer would have certainly helped to make it more intelligent but as an action film it works fine particularly for German standards. The car chases are really well made but some of the fight scenes look extremely amateurish. All in all the film works surprinsingly well and provides good entertainment for 90 minutes. There are some very well made atmospheric shots of Duisburg and particvularly the location of the last scene is spectacular. However you can't help thinking that in a way it is a missed opportunity due to he sub standard writing which the later Schmanski episodes show. What they lack in action the make up interms of quality of the stories.
2 Reviews
Schimanski gets framed
Horst_In_Translation4 August 2016
Warning: Spoilers
"Zabou" is a West German German-language film from 1987, so this one will have its 30th anniversary next year. The director is Hajo Gies and the writers are Axel Götz and Martin Gies, brother of the director. The lead actor is the recently deceased Götz George of course. His Schimanski is the most famous and most popular police detective from the long-running German crime series "Tatort". He was so well-known that he got his own series "Schimanski" and also appeared in the films "Zahn um Zahn" and "Zabou", this one here. It runs for slightly under 100 minutes and has Schimanski be in a serious predicament when bullets from his gun are found in a corpse at a place where he was partying earlier and had a date with a hot young punk girl. And as if that wasn't bad enough already, Schimanski gets into a car crash and ends up in a hospital. But this of course does not keep him from investigating on his own as usual as the lone wolf character he is and he runs into a whole group of criminals and a young woman who is mysteriously involved with this all. The cast here includes more known names than "Zahn um Zahn". We get to see the young Claudia Messner, the young Hannes Jaenicke and the fairly young Dieter Pfaff and Ralf Richter. Also Klaus Lage, the singer who we also hear, acts in a short performance in here too. All in all, George elevates the material once again and the ending is pretty nice and the beginning is fine okay, but everything in between is really not memorable at all and that's a whole lot for a film of this runtime. It shows once again here that you don't want to be a female character in a Schimanski movie. It often doesn't end well for these. I myself like George and hope he rests in peace, but the production here was certainly not on par with his talent. I give "Zabou" a thumbs-down. Not recommended.
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