Che

Like Steven Spielberg's A.I., Steven Soderbergh's Che is defined by dichotomies. The former split along the lines of the deceptively opposed visions of its two primary auteurs, while Che is openly structured as a dialectic. Split into two parts but originally shown in America only as a whole, Che uses its division more as a marker of contrast, clearly separating the two revolutions in which Ernesto "Che" Guevara participated and the vast difference in their outcomes. Soderbergh shot each part with different actors, in different styles, even in differing aspect ratios, further emphasizing the distinctions between the two.

Of course, few directors' careers are so defined by dialectics as Soderbergh's, who balances mainstream endeavors with experimental features; in 2009 alone, he released a broad comedy about corporate avarice and deception starring an A-list player (The Informant!), and also an avant-garde deadpan satire on the same topic featuring a porn star playing an escort (The Girlfriend Experience). The great Terrence Malick was once assigned to the film before dropping out to make The New World, leaving Benicio del Toro to turn to Soderbergh, who'd originally agreed to helm the project when they collaborated on Traffic, to once more take over the wheel. It was a cunning decision; only Soderbergh could have made a biopic that as blatantly unconcerned with biopic conventions as Malick, though the styles of the two -- poetic elision vs. fussy, detail-oriented deconstruction -- could hardly be more different.

Che's first half, The Argentine, concerns the revolution in Cuba from 1957-58. Soderbergh gives us sparse background for the movement, opening with a verité, grainy 16mm show of a victorious Che conducting an interview in Havana in 1964 and a brief flashback of Guevara meeting Fidel Castro (Demian Bichir) and a handful of other future revolutionaries as they dine in cozy postwar accommodations, wearing button down business shirts that seem so alien compared to the images we have of these figures, ever sporting military uniforms. They speak only fleetingly of their dissatisfaction with Cuba's status as a pawn of American imperialism; this meeting is the final confirmation of plans, not the initial trade of ideas and rhetoric. Soderbergh then cuts to Cuba, studying the manner with which the band of rebels managed to overcome a U.S.-backed dictatorship.

Che with future wife Aleida March (Catalina Sandino Moreno). Isn't it nice when couples like the same things?

As Amy Taubin astutely notes, Soderbergh films Che always in medium- or long-shot, never in close-up, emphasizing his Marxist commitment to being one of the people, as well as the perception of Che as the great rock star of extremist intellectuals. Furthermore, he hasn't yet proven himself among the Cuban soldiers: they refer to him as "Doc," "the Argentine" or "Che" (Argentinian slang for "boy" or "dude"), truly just one of the fighters and an unproven one at that. His asthma occasionally makes him a liability -- one suspenseful sequence involves Guevara attempting to hide from Batista troops while stifling a coughing fit -- and his services as a doctor initially prove far more valuable than his tactics. Indeed, his medical assistance plays a significant part of winning over Cuban citizens as the 26th of July Movement advances through the forest, and many of the farmers he treats regard him with confusion and awe, simply because they've never seen a doctor before. One child remarks after Che tells her mother to eat more meat "That guy's lying. He tells everyone that," but you can see the malnutrition and neglect among the rural populace, a sharp contrast to the wealth enjoyed by Batista's government and the major cities that bustle with American business (somewhere in Havana, Michael Corleone is disinterestedly eyeing a solid gold telephone given as a gift by a corporation to Batista).

Despite the sweeping grandiosity of the beautiful establishing shots of the Cuban forests and the focus on the battles to take Cuba, Soderbergh crafts The Argentine into a strikingly experimental endeavor: he gives us battle scenes but replaces the audio with Che's musings from his Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, the memoir that forms the foundation of this film's narrative, as well as out of sequence clips from his trip to New York in 1964 to speak before the U.N. While the cutting between the two settings can be at times questionable, even borderline haphazard, it allows us to see how Che's actions in the field craft his image, to the point that he can arrive in New York as the toast of bourgeois intellectuals, all of whom would likely be wearing those damn T-shirts with his face on them if they existed then. In fact, their vacuous, obliviously ironic worship of the guerrilla, combined with his natural rock star presence and Soderbergh's decision to shoot these scenes in grainy, monochrome 16mm, makes it all but impossible not to see Che as the predecessor of Bob Dylan in D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back. Che suffers the platitudes of fans who don't understand him and the scorn of conservatives who fear him, and he reacts to his cult of personality with sneering derision. The parties Che attends in New York provide a sharp contrast from the brief, on-point discussion between Che, Fidel and the other founders of the 26th of July Movement at the start of the film: where that meeting showed intellectuals who'd already decided to back up their beliefs with action and merely needed to hear the others voicing support, the well-dressed peons sit around and prattle incessantly, munching too-expensive, too-pretentious finger foods as they attempt to set themselves up as sympathetic to the plight of the poor in Latin America and elsewhere.


Back in Cuba in '58, Che's confidence grows as he rises through the ranks, and he uses his increasing authority to exert rigid conformity to the ideals of the revolution. Slowly, the darker side Soderbergh never reveals of Che (not even in the second part, but more on that later) begins to seep into the periphery: he uses slurs to mock those whose commitment falters when hardships befall the guerrillas and executes a pair of deserters for stealing harvest from local farmers and raping a young woman, all while posing as high-ranking officers in the movement -- Che's tone of voice suggests the latter tidbit enrages him as much as the actual crimes. Yet he also displays the more egalitarian and populist side of his devotion to Marxist ideals: at the end of the film, after Che and Fidel lead the revolution to victory, Guevara spots some revolutionaries driving a stolen car in the convoy and orders them to return it. Even if it belonged to a loyalist soldier, the movement cannot expect to bring about massive change if they do not hold to their ideals; indeed, following the last major engagement, Che tells one impatient soldier, "We've only won the war. The Revolution starts now."

Those ideals are sorely missing, however, when Che heads to Bolivia in 1965. Part Two of Che, Guerrilla, shows the doctor attempting to start another revolution from scratch in the heart of South America, not too far from his homeland of Argentina. If The Argentine profiled a revolt that succeeded, Guerrilla depicts one that fails catastrophically. Also based on one of Che's memoirs, The Bolivian Diaries, Part Two dissects the mounting troubles of Guevara's attempted coup and the effect of inevitable loss on the fighter. Compared to the epic wide-screen panoramas and lush color scheme of The Argentine, Guerrilla shrinks the frame nearly to a square, boxing in the protagonist as his youthful idealism turns to ruthless pragmatism. Soderbergh slightly mutes the colors and brings the soundtrack to the fore, mixing the faint sounds of chirping birds and running water with Alberto Iglesias' haunting minimalistic score -- at once even more wildly inappropriate for a biopic and even more perfectly suited to the material than his different approach to the first film -- to create an aural isolation to match the somber visuals.

Del Toro performs an about-face with the character in Part Two, and Guerrilla can frustrate at times as the dynamic presence of The Argentine gives way to a somber, increasingly withdrawn and paranoid figure, slumped over and covered in a blanket that distorts his shape. The rainforest exacerbates his asthma, and the ragged beard he allows to envelop that iconic face destroys the last remaining indication of the man we just followed to victory.

If one takes both parts in one sitting, Guerrilla might easily strike the viewer as repetitive: Che arrives in Bolivia more or less as he did in Cuba, as a foreigner who has to convince natives that he's one of them. He cannot capitalize on his image at first, as he must disguise himself as a nobody to prevent attracting attention before he can marshal forces. When he does mount a campaign, the U.S. moves to intervene, sending anti-insurgency forces to train the Bolivian army. And so, while each action never turns out as it did in Cuba, the actions are nevertheless similar, occasionally identical, to ones when saw in the last half. Yet this decision reveals a subtle direction by Soderbergh to delve into the legend without directly commenting on him: the Che of Part Two abandons the ideals he embodied in the first part (the director devotes a telling close-up about halfway through of a Rolex watch Che wears), and his willingness -- eagerness, even -- to renounce his position in the Cuban government at the start of the film to go back to a jungle somewhere and train an army reveals that the intellectual can only truly function as a force of destruction; social revolution is just an excuse to shoot people. The first part of Che was called The Argentine, reflecting how Guevara had to become the legend we know today after starting only with his background. Soderbergh dubbed Part Two Guerrilla, an indicator that he'd cemented his reputation by the time he went to Bolivia but also as a clue of his identity: in the first he was defined by his homeland, here as a guerrilla. Not a political leader or an ideologue, but a guerrilla, a fighter. By essentially restarting the narrative of the first half, Soderbergh shows how Che was willing to throw away everything simply for the chance to keep fighting somewhere, without openly commenting upon Che's more twisted actions.

(I confess I was somewhat peeved that Soderbergh never addresses the mass killings Che headed as the leader of military tribunals in the wake of the victory in Cuba, not even in the brief text scroll preceding Guerrilla. Though he never builds Che up as a saint, he gives us only two vague indications of his more criminal side: at the end of The Argentine, he tells a soldier to spare a prisoner and ominously declares, "He will be judged by tribunal." At the end of Guerrilla, Guevara attempts to dismiss Cuban-American CIA agent Félix Rodriguez by saying "I don't talk to traitors," only for the agent to mention, "You executed my uncle." Considering how well the film mines dialectics, it's disappointing that these are the biggest examples given of Che's cruelty, but then I suppose Soderbergh would have had to have portrayed him openly as heroic in places to balance it out.)


Compared to the jumping timeline of its predecessor, Guerrilla progresses in such a linear fashion that it even gives us the day of operations every few scenes to break down the passage of time. Soderbergh also uses more handheld shots instead of the more formal ones in The Argentine, the grittier look better suited to capturing the slow downfall of a myth in what is, basically, a horror film. Following the initial recruitment, Che never seems to attract any more followers, only losing the few he commands to fatigue, capture and death. Yet he still retains that certain charisma even in his frailty and fear: when Bolivian forces capture him, he subtly intimidates and goads the brasher officers and nearly charms one young guard into releasing him. This moment, as well as an ill-advised POV shot of Che's execution that depicts Guevara falling to the ground before the frame fades to white, serves to rebuild Che's image enough to point toward his ensuing martyrdom among the intellectuals and the genuinely oppressed throughout the world. For my money, though, Soderbergh's final shot is a more appropriate ending: he returns to the brief moment at the start of The Argentine, as Che rides a boat to Cuba from Mexico with Fidel and the other revolutionaries. As he gazes over the ocean and his eyes dart nervously to Castro, we can see the doctor wondering just what he'd gotten himself into, and though he never openly communicates such doubt again, we see how his fears were justified; he just felt them for the wrong revolution.

With Che, Soderbergh eschews the great pitfall of the biopic genre -- the tendency to inadvertently shift attention from the subject to the events that happened around him or her -- by simply placing focus on three chief events in Che's life. This decision allows him to spend enough time in Cuba, Bolivia, even New York, to see how the character truly responds, adapts and acts to each situation. The procedural structure of the two films, the intent focus not on speechifying and Big Moments that go out of their way to define themselves as such but the mechanics of the warfare Che helped orchestrate, is highly original but should come as no surprise to Soderbergh fans. His films typically focus on how things work, from the giddily technical breakdown of the heists in the Oceans films (what makes them enjoyable in relation to their occasionally asphyxiating postmodern sense of cool) to the experimental deconstructions of narrative and film with The Limey and Schizopolis. The Eisensteinian montage that precedes the decisive Battle of Santa Clara in Cuba (a comment not only on the propagandic nature of Che's radio address but the townspeople who are at stake in the coming fight), the way that battle is structured to reveal Che's tactical brilliance, the aforementioned shot of the Rolex Che wears in Bolivia, these shots manage to communicate fundamental truths about Che through his actions.

Soderbergh's use of dialectics in the film reflects not only his wont as a restless filmmaker who loves contrast but of the Marxist idea of advancement through dialectics: we see Che the victor and Che the martyr, warm yellows and drab blue-greens, inspiring wide-screen and stifling full-frame. The dialectic between his objective, matter-of-fact visuals and the use of Che's personal diaries as a means of voiceover and of general mood allows for a revealing portrait of the figure outside of the equally hysterical views of him on both sides of the political spectrum. So, yes, while the omission of his role in executions is lamentable, we're allowed a much subtler presentation of Che as someone who just loves a good fight with the structure of Guerrilla.

The director captures all of this with the Red One camera, having received the latest prototypes mere hours before shooting began, and if Red wants to attract business it should host clips of the film and perhaps send out copies of Criterion's Blu-Ray to convince potential buyers. It handles the gorgeous textures of Cuba's countryside and the stark portrayal of Bolivia with equal clarity and beauty, at times nearly impossible to differentiate from ordinary film stock. Its 4K master and fantastic audio track place the film on the fast-track to becoming reference material for home theater systems.

Like so many of Soderbergh's films, Che is ambitious, technically marvelous and often frustrating. Like his subject, Soderbergh is both rebellious and mainstream, somehow able to $60 million for a two-film, foreign language biopic so off the beaten stylistic path that it barely found distribution despite Del Toro's deserved win of the Best Actor award at Cannes. Yet Soderbergh also remains a figure of Hollywood, crafting star vehicles and campaigning against movie piracy. He manages to juggle his entire career, his varying styles and auterial concerns, with Che; its tone is one of curiosity, not hagiography. The director doesn't seek to sanctify or vilify Guevara, instead only to study his process and glean something of the man through it. To bring back the tenuous connection I made to A.I. at the beginning of this review, Che is downright sloppy at times, but it's better for it: the second part opens with photos of miners without any context. Soderbergh wants us to go out and research for ourselves to delve into the story of the Siglo XX miners, and of the other aspects of Che's life and the events he influenced. When Soderbergh made Traffic, he offered no real answers to the drug problem because he felt that Hollywood could not adequately cover enough of the topic to provide a serious and viable solution; here, he does not attempt to offer a definitive conclusion of the man, which will likely remain impossible as opinion is still so sharply divided among conflicting ideologues. That's what irks me about one aspect of Criterion's otherwise spectacular packaging. It comes with a miniature poster of Del Toro adopting the famous pose of Alberto Korda's timeless photograph, and if Che can be said to have any sociopolitical aspirations, it wants only to grab every snot-nosed, lackadaisically rebellious teenager by the ear and shout "Take off that fucking T-shirt."

The Bourne Supremacy

A friend of mine commented on my review of The Bourne Identity that he would never watch the films because the sequels follow not the plots of Ludlum's books but stretch out the first book to fit the framework of the whole franchise. That might explain why plot takes a backseat in both of the sequels. Now, I can appreciate his feelings and of many other fans who might feel they lost the chance to ever see the books they enjoy on the big screen, especially a series as lauded as Ludlum's, so I hope he isn't too offended when I say that, from the bottom of my heart, I don't care. I don't care that Tony Gilroy decided to stick with the first book for three whole films, and I imagine I won't care when I finally read the books, no matter how much I love them. Why? Because with these sequels, Doug Liman, Paul Greengrass and Tony Gilroy made the best action films of the decade.

Greengrass takes over the director's chair for Liman, who still stayed on as a producer, to controversial results. Greengrass of course is the fellow to thank -- or blame, as many of us would -- for the rise of hand-held camera usage in major Hollywood films. His style of constant movement and breakneck editing makes even scenes of dialogue or a man packing a bag as visceral as a shootout. Greengrass' style spawned a wave of imitators, some of which benefited from this style (Collateral) but mostly detract and annoy (Public Enemies, Quantum of Solace).

The problem is that no one has Greengrass' knack for using this technique. His editing creates a disorienting, visceral experience, but he knows to give us at least some clue of what's going on. His restlessness comes with a vague hint of restraint, and his most interesting shots contain not action but dialogue, for he loves to quick-zoom on his actors' faces, better to read their buried emotions. I was also taken with a tracking shot through a subway that was so stable I pegged it as a Steadicam shot, only for the frame to bounce ever so slightly, signifying as a regular hand-held shot like all the rest.

Greengrass is perfectly suited for the task of filming Jason Bourne's ongoing adventure to recover his identity and memories, as The Bourne Supremacy takes some dark turns that push our hero to the edge. Still hiding from the CIA two years after the events of the last film, Bourne enjoys a bit of happiness with girlfriend Marie. They both are ready to run at any moment, but the CIA has relaxed the pressure enough for them to get a bit complacent. That, of course, is when the strike come, and Marie is tragically murdered as she and Bourne attempt to get out of a crowded village in India.

So now, Bourne turns from the hunted to the hunter. He still evades capture, but his thirst for revenge drives him to take the fight to the agents who will not leave him in peace. In the first film, Bourne was always surprised when he instinctively drew upon his fighting prowess, and that held him back somewhat. Here, he knows that intelligence agencies turned him into a killing machine, and his fighting is significantly more brutal. Greengrass photographs these vicious fistfights in such a way that every punch feels as though it breaks bones and ruptures organs.

The car chases are better, too. The biggest action piece of the film concerns a chase through the streets of Moscow, as exciting and confusing a sequence as you could ever hope to see. While I can certainly buy MI6 outfitting James Bond's Aston-Martin and BMW's with heavy armor (I mean, wouldn't you start there before trying to make it invisible?), but I never really bought his fancy little speedsters taking all the crashes and bullets and rockets they did. But Bourne commandeers boxy Euro cars, the kind that look as though they can take some punishment. And Lord knows Bourne's antics put them to the test more thoroughly than the best crash ratings.

While the story means far less here than in the first by virtue of stretching out the final act of a single book, The Bourne Supremacy is no less intriguing thanks to its actors. Brian Cox and Joan Allen deepen the levels of distrust and secrecy even within a single organization, as Allen's Landy attempts to sort out the bureaucratic mess left in the wake of Treadstone's failure. Abbot spends all of his efforts laying the blame for any loose ends on Bourne's feet and further raises Landy's ire against the agent when he pins the deaths of some of her agents on him as well. Allen is marvelous as the initially ruthless boss who begins to uncover the truth and doubt the necessity to find and stop Bourne.

Damon only improves upon the role he excelled at in the first film. He's got movie star looks, but also a plainness that allows him to fade into a crowd in any part of the world. Bourne only has about three facial expressions -- blank, tense and furious -- but Damon captures the torrent of emotions flowing underneath and presents a character who works as a three-dimensional study, not just some cartoonish, indestructible spy. Performances like this add to Greengrass' impeccable use of shaky cam (if only he was the sole person using the technique, because he embarrasses everyone else) to make a pulse-pounding thriller that lacks Identity's story but improves upon it in every other way.

The Bourne Identity

Though published throughout the '80s, Robert Ludlum's Bourne franchise came to the big screen at the exact right time. When The Bourne Identity premiered in 2002, the spy genre was all but dead: the Tom Clancy adaptation The Sum of All Fears, not one of his more spy-centric novels, did well enough at the box office but felt stale and pre-packaged, and the Bond series had reached the nadir of its self-parody with The World is Not Enough (2000) and Die Another Day (2002). Even the spy piss-take Austin Powers mustered up a gag-inducing sequel to pad out its already-thin franchise into a trilogy; as if the genre needed a parody at that point anyway.

The Bourne series changed all that. The first franchise of the post-9/11 era, Bourne saw through the glitz and glamor of Bond franchises and the like and crafted a gripping, brutal series that favored realism over gadget and sex-filled fantasy. Jason Bourne does not chase people down in Aston Martins outfitted with machine guns and invisibility cloaks; heck, in this film, he's the one being chased. This is a world of "real" cars, of Minis and Peugeots and Ford's European models. The only gadgets at his disposal are items he rigs himself.

Perhaps the greatest shift that The Bourne Identity brings is that it actually engages as a spy mystery. Spy films had grown so bloated that they were either lame comedies or over-the-top action spectacles. The very first shot, like some homage to Sunset Boulevard, shows a man face down in the ocean, presumably dead. A fishing crew recovers his body and a doctor removes bullets and a strange device, and he also discovers some strange documents. The man awakens but has no memory of who he is or what his odd personal effects mean.

The mystery of Bourne's identity, especially when taken in context with the series' sequels, amounts to little more than a MacGuffin. Here, however, it forms the basis of a solid plot, one from which the action flows naturally without ever seeming like the script was built around big stunts. In fact, you could hardly call the action pieces of this film "big": Bourne fights like an actual person, using his martial arts and weapon knowledge to quickly and brutally dispatch opponents. He doesn't need to strap a henchman to a rocket or feed them to sharks to kill somebody. The car chases of the film come the closest to a grand scale sequence, but Liman stresses tension and suspense over action, to great effect. The only moment that ever stands as too over the top comes when Bourne must shoot his way out of a hotel and basically jumps from the highest floor on top of the body of a man he killed, somehow aims and shoots another hitman right between the eyes on the way down, and survives the fall. In an otherwise straightforward film, this is a bit much.

Nevertheless, Bourne's story is filled with perfectly cast, interesting characters who add just as much intrigue as the lead. Marie (Franka Potente), an American citizen who's been backpacking around Europe for years, finds herself caught up in the mess when Bourne offers her some serious cash to drive him out of Paris. Yes, there is an inevitable romance, but it feels plausible, a result of Bourne's kindness and his frequent attempts to get her out of harm's way. Potente, the star of Run Lola Run, knows a thing or two about being on the run for an entire movie, and she has an excellent moment when Jason sends her into a hotel to get his guest records -- he can't as he is presumed dead -- and lays out a complicated plan to sneak through and steal the files, only for Marie to walk out two minutes later with the info, calming stating that she simply asked for them.

Meanwhile, the C.I.A. and Treadstone characters all have a suitable level of sinister intrigue. Treadstone director Conklin (Chris Cooper) reveals early on that Bourne works for the C.I.A., but he doesn't let this spoil the mystery over what went wrong with the trained assassin. You believe Cooper when he sends out other killers (played by Nicky Naude and Clive Owen, who offers up some simple but poignant lines at the end) to terminate Bourne simply because he's a stain on the department's sterling record. His direct superior, Ward Abbot (Brian Cox), has been kept in the dark about Bourne's failure, so he too must sift through the jumbled lies to sort out just who's head will go on the chopping block.

Paul Greengrass would take over the sequels and infuse them with his shaky cam style of shooting (more on that in later reviews), but Liman, previously known for indie fare like Swingers and Go, does a grand job with the fast-paced action. His more traditional approach allows for disorienting chases and fights and calm, stately shots of people conversing or characters silently moving.

So, The Bourne Identity has all the ingredients for a great action thriller: it's contained enough to ratchet up the suspense, but visceral enough to maintain the adrenaline. It proved that Matt Damon, heretofore known for his roles as troubled young men, proves to be an able and bankable action heavyweight, and he's a sight more intimidating than Bond ever was. Despite a few glaring problems -- the aforementioned "flight" down the stairs and that final scene which is just too cute to fit in with the rest of the movie -- this is an engaging ride that wonderfully sets up the best action trilogy ever made.

Run Lola Run

I was looking forward to watching this movie. My film teacher decided it was good enough for class (though he did show Donnie Darko, so I find his judgment a little suspect), and I've heard all sorts of good things about the movie. Imagine my surprise, then, when the lights came down in the classroom and I had to sit through the longest 76 minutes of my life.

Run Lola Run concerns itself with its titular character (Franka Potente), who receives a frantic phone call from her boyfriend at the start of the film. She was supposed to pick him up after he made an exchange for a local crime boss, but someone nicked her moped so she never came. Well, poor Manni had to take the tube, and he accidentally left a sack full of 100,000 Deutschmarks on the train when he ran from cops. A homeless man picked up the bag, and now Manni has to come up with 100,000 marks before crime boss Ronnie meets him for the payment.

What results in a visually inventive yet ultimately dull piece of flash that's so preoccupied with creating an original film that it does not bother to make it good. Lola agrees to meet Manni in order to prevent him from doing something silly like robbing a store, and her 20-minute run repeats two more times, each with wildly different outcomes based on the tiniest variations. When Lola accidentally runs into a person or near a cyclist, we see snapshots of their futures, and these futures play out indirectly as a response to their interactions with Lola.

But those aren't the only tricks writer-director Tom Tykwer uses to add flash to the story: he intersperses Lola's runs with animated stretches, film references, and total asides to background characters. For him, Lola is running so fast that she break the very properties of physics, even though she still moves realistically. When a run ends in tragedy, he fades to red, shows us a tinted flashback, then starts the whole thing over again.

Now, the point of the alternate storylines is, of course, a simple take on the butterfly effect, that old theory that the tiniest interactions have the most drastic consequences. You know, a butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing, and the distortion in the wind magnifies until a thunderstorm hits San Fransisco. Every time Lola begins her run something minor occurs in the beginning animated segment, and it generally informs the new direction her run will take her.

You could also argue that Tykwer is making an argument for the idea of predestination and fate with these runs. When Lola runs past a cyclist the first time and we see his future, we see that he eventually crashes, falls in love with the nurse who helps him recover, and the two live happily ever after. The second time Lola passes him, we see that he becomes a bum. Everything is all a game of chance, and our lives all depend on the tiny interactions that make them up.

What I took from the film, however, is that Tykwer simply proves that film has no consequences, that emotional involvement is pointless because it's all based on the whims of its creators. Run Lola Run is its own trilogy, the same idea repeated three times with just enough variations to make them "different;" even characters can come back from death if people love them enough. I suppose that could be a meta-statement of sorts, but really it just comes off like Tykwer only had enough material for a short film and decided, logic be damned, to just repeat the thing three different times.

Any enjoyment you might take from this film can be directly attributed to editor Mathilde Bonnefoy, who offers up a veritable feast of quick cuts and visceral editing. However, I couldn't help but wonder how a film only 76 minutes and filled with such an action-packed style could be so boring. Most if not all of the blame falls upon Tykwer, who tried to write funny lines and failed, derailed its interesting structure with some pointless shots that strip the film of its urgency, then forcing us to sit through these flaws two more times. The actors do a pretty good job, but at the end of the day if a thriller is going to risk thrills by taking itself this seriously it better have the substance to back it up. Run Lola Run simply doesn't.