"Steig. Nicht. Aus!" is a new German thriller from 2018 written and directed by Christian Alvart, who not too long ago made the headlines with his Til Schweiger cinema Tatort that was not too well-received, but honestly this 105-minute mvoie we have here is even worse. way worse. The premise does not sound too bad. It is about a man in a car with his two children and he is threatened via telephone that there is a bomb under the car that will explode the moment he or anybody else gets out of the car. I have heard other reviewers say that it reminded them a bit of the Colin Farrell movie Phone Booth, also with the claustrophobic component, and yes I thought of that too right away. But it really is just in theory this way because in practice, absolutely everything goes wrong that can go wrong here. The script is a mess on many occasions. The characters are written in a way where they make hardly any sense. The complete lack of shades in Herzsprung and Jovanovic is the best example. Actually, the moment Herzsprung enters the picture, is where it all gets even worse. It was weak before that already, but it gets really bad afterward. But it's not even all Herzsprung's fault. The film is packed with complete lack of realism, especially in the second half. Are they really trying to convince us that they did not even check the brother's ID before they let him talk to the man in the car. And this is just one example. The entire movie is proof of how the ambition is there to make a quality thriller, but the execution is really really failure level no matter which perspective you take. Even Möhring, who is usually a solid actor I guess, had 2 or 3 very bad overacting moments. Hardly anything here makes sense and would have happened like that in real life. This refers to the plot twists, including the of-course very forced happy ending, but also to all kinds of details that feel very shoddy. The punctuation in the title is already fairly cringeworthy in my opinion. And yes the song used for the closing credits was another wtf moment because it did not fit at all. This film is the opposite of quietly convincing, it is loud, boastful and hecticel, which by definition is not a problem as there are more than enough films fitting this description that are well-executed. But this one here not at all. The only one I can give a thumbs-up to is probably Emily Kusche who was fine all the time basically and it's not her fault how this turned out. Christiane Paul is okay too I guess, but she also did not have too much screen time and too much to work with. And all of them just like Marc Hosemann (in theory a great villain choice) clearly suffered at times from the way their characters were written, like for Paul for example the stupid cheating story line. The ways in which they wanted to show us how everbody is flawed in terms of morals and character, also the protagonist as we find out eventually, was handled in a very amateurish manner. And the entire film suffered from the way the story was written. It was basically a Cobra 11 cinema version at times, probably even worse as Cobra 11 at least has an okay episode here and there. I don't want to go into detail really about the exact scenes and moments where the film sucked, but you will easily recognize them. The longer it goes, the more frequent these scenes become. It is such a pity. Maybe my hopes were initially also too high for this film and that has to do with my disappointment, but come on. With this interesting premise, the film really could not have been any worse. The trailer actually looked decent from what I remember. But the dialogue writing also feels extremely unrealistic, in many scenes in a way that the characters never would talk like. It''s also a really generic movie. When they are going for emotion, it's never successful. One example early on is how the two kids, usually arguing, suddenly stick together when they find out about the situation. And the boy basically had nothing to do all film because he was basically bleeding out inside the car. The way Yardim's character's car exploded early on was intended to make obvious that the situation is serious and no joke, but I never felt the tension and basically always know how they'd go out. And the longer it went, the less I cared about the actual explanation then. So overall, this is a movie that hits absolutely all the wrong notes in a manner I never would have expected. What a bummer. Huge thumbs-down. Highly not recommended.
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