Film review by Kevin Patterson
RUN LOLA RUN Rating: ***1/2 (out of four) R, 1999 Director/Screenplay: Tom Tykwer Starring Cast: Franka Potente
RUN LOLA RUN should be required viewing for all Hollywood action-movie directors. Here is a film that is as fast-paced and exciting as anything I've seen the past couple of years, and not only does it establish its breakneck pace without blowing anything up or dropping giant pieces of CGI on the screen, but it even creates a couple of sympathetic characters and offers some clever bits of commentary and insight along the way.
The premise is about as simple as they come. Lola (Franka Potente), a young woman living with her parents, receives a frantic telephone call from her boyfriend Manni, who has misplaced 100,000 deutschmarks of drug money only twenty minutes before he was supposed to deliver it to a gangster. Certain that he will be killed if he shows up without the money, he plans to rob a grocery store. Lola begs him to wait and promises to come up with the money--somehow. Since her bicycle has been stolen, she has to run from one location to the next as she tries to come up with the cash.
All of this exposition occurs in the first ten or fifteen minutes. Following that, writer/director Tom Tykwer shows us three different scenarios for what will happen in the next twenty minutes. Suffice it to say that all of them involve Lola scrambling between several locations, and that in each case it goes right down to the wire before we see whether Lola and Manni will escape their predicament or not. I would estimate that at least five to seven minutes of each scenario are spent on Lola running through the streets, yet these scenes do not grow tiresome in the least. Tykwer has a particularly flamboyant visual style: his camera rarely sits still, and when it does, it's usually watching from an unusual angle. More often, it's following Lola on one of her mad dashes, circling rapidly around a character in crisis, or even taking a swooping dive towards the scene. But his methods are varied enough to avoid overkill, and the combination of his hyperactive camera work and the film's energetic techno score make for a brand of frenetic action that is rare even in today's world of hi-tech filmmaking.
The most interesting aspect of RUN LOLA RUN is the way in which Tykwer uses the differing scenarios to reflect his ideas about fate and chance. In each, there are at first only minor variations, but they soon lead to larger ones. For example, in both the first and second scenarios, Lola goes to her father's bank to try to get the money, but in the second, someone trips her as she runs down the stairs. As a result, the timing of her later collision with a passerby varies by a second or two, and when she gets to the bank, she arrives at a somewhat more uncomfortable moment in her father's conversation with his illicit lover. Thus his reaction to her sudden appearance is much more immediately hostile, which dramatically alters everything that follows. Tykwer also employs a clever gimmick whereby he momentarily cuts away from Lola to someone whom she has just passed, then shows a quick series of photographs that detail the rest of the person's life. These are also sometimes dramatically different between scenarios, depending on what exactly happens when Lola passes the person.
I've grown somewhat tired of movies that establish their hip credentials by making criminals their protagonists, but RUN LOLA RUN gets away with it because it manages to portray its characters sympathetically without whitewashing their actions. It is when Lola and Manni abandon their criminal impulses that they are most successful in escaping their predicament, and in one case divine intervention even seems to play a role. Two wrongs don't make a right in this film, and when Lola or Manni starts threatening violence or attempting robbery, things tend to go even further awry as a result.
This is not to say that RUN LOLA RUN is some sort of philosophical masterpiece, just that it can lay claim to a certain amount of depth underneath its high style. It isn't the most intelligent film of the year, but it might be the most entertaining, and it reaches that plateau without falling into the category of a guilty pleasure.
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