"Mara and the Firebringer" is a German German-language movie from 2015, so this one is almost two years old. It is live action and runs for under 90 minutes (without the credits). The director is Tommy Krappweis and he also adapted his own novel for the screen here. I read that this is the first of three novels only, so there may be more films coming in the next years. Krappweis began his career on the famous RTL Samstag Nacht when he was in his 20s and he managed a pretty respectable career that lead him to "Bernd das Brot" and now to Mara, so most of his work is definitely for younger audiences. The cast here includes Esther Schweins who starred alongside Krappweis on Samstag Nacht back then and this may certainly have to do with her casting here. There are more familiar faces like Liefers, who can be considered a co-lead surely, Eva Habermann, Christof Maria Herbst who plays a character where you can never be sure if he is an antagonist and more. Cameos include voice acting by Thomas Fritsch and Oliver Kalkofe (a personal favorite and he voices a small tree branch here). In addition, Heino Ferch gives a one-scene performance.
As for the movie, it is all about the fantasy aspect. There is probably no other genre in here. It's about a girl who discovers her special powers and quickly realizes with the help of a university professor tat she has to stop a truly evil force from wreaking mayhem. This force is actually the one mentioned in the title, even if it may initially just sound like a torch or something. It is much more than that. Herbst plays a very different character here than he usually does and that's a good thing to see him discover new approaches after "Stromberg", even if I am not too sure if the character suited him or his talent. Liefers I am usually very critical, but in the first half (with the introduction and all), he was definitely among the better aspects. But this may also be due to the costume only. In the second half, sadly he is back to his usual routine by giving us (not really) funny one-liners all the time and it sucks. And the scenes when he pushes away grown-ups and children on two occasions were pretty cringeworthy as with him I always have a feeling that his career is really all about being successfully at the center of attention while almost never offering good performances or range at all. But yeah, like I said, he is not among the worst aspects of the film and that's certainly not in the film's favor.
Lead actress is Lilian Prent and I did not like her voice, which is pretty harmful as she has many voice-over scenes. When we see her, her acting is better, but I'm not sure if it's good enough for a lead performance. The whole movie itself did not really work for me. The transformation from a girl who just wants to be a random girl into a fearless superhero never felt really authentic and the scenes with Schwein's character embarrassing her get old pretty quickly. Comedy surely isn't this movie's greatest strength. And neither is the fantasy, which is clearly a case of quantity over quality. At some point, we get new fantastic creatures and characters like every couple minutes and character elaboration is pretty nonexistent, which is also a big problem with the human characters as well and this includes Mara too. It just all feels for the sake of it and never really like telling a fantastic (in the truest sense of the word) story. So yeah, for as much as I care, Krappweis does not need to make any further films on the subject or at least maybe cast another lead actress and considerably step up his writing and filmmaking in general. This first film is really painfully mediocre already and offers audiences considerably more negative than positive aspects. It's probably only somewhat known because German fantasy movies aren't really a frequent occurrence. Watch something else instead.
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