I think the title would have sounder better in the original German
dir: Christian Zübert
2025
So now there’s another Die Hard variant, only this time it’s “German Die Hard but in the American Consulate so they speak German and English half the time, and WITH A WOMAN!”, plus she doesn’t really need to be in the building the whole time, but she chooses to, because they’ve kidnapped HER SON!
As Die Hard variants, this is ok. I don’t know why it’s made with an English-speaking (only) audience in mind, with people never speaking too much Deutsche before reverting to English at any given time, even if they’re not people known for their crisp pronunciation of the great Germanic language. I mean, Dougray Scott pretending to be an American who’s fluent in German?
His nationality is in his name, somewhat. Now, he’s playing mid-level bureaucrat middle aged villains with bad moustaches. It’s not Movember, Dougray, no excuses for that monstrosity.
The star of the show is a German actor I’m not going to pretend I’ve seen in anything else, being Jeanne Goursaud, playing Sara Wulf, an ex-special forces type person who is our main character.
Unlike a lot of films lately starring bald ex-wrestlers or bald Stathams, Sara can fuck people up royally with some okay choreography, but she often loses fights too, which is somewhat more realistic. I mean, special forces is special forces, but they’re more likely to kill a whole village through poisoning their water supply or torture civilians just for practice rather than actually have to dominate a consulate full of Marines.
She slinks around, smashes some peoples’ ugly stupid faces in, loses a fight, gets bailed up somewhere, then the flick slows down to deliver either backstory exposition or gruntingly edge the plot forward in strange and not entirely delightful ways.
The primary plot is, what happened to her son Joshua when she came to the consulate, waited for hours, and then he disappeared? Because the American consulate staff in this massive set of non-descript buildings all swear they never saw him, and there’s nothing indicate he was ever there.
The pseudo primary plot is: why the fuck is this all happening? The film may pretend that there is a interesting reason, but it’s pretty goofy, makes less than no sense (that the “true” villain orchestrated any of this when there are 15 other ways to achieve their aim, and ultimately doesn’t matter). And if I tried to flowchart it, it would put me and you to sleep.
Is she perhaps, to use the technical term, cray cray? I mean, we saw her son, and we saw other people interacting with her son, but some guy showed some pictures and video footage where the son does not appear, and Sara looks like a nutter talking to her imaginary child?
She wonders, maybe, maybe I am going crazier. She, like every character in everything made now, has PTSD, and neurological trauma to boot, and flashes of what I would call “narratively convenient hallucinations”, to the point where the movie wastes precious minutes with her pretending that she doubts herself. She calls her own mother, and her mother is like “are you taking your crazy pills Sara, because you’re sounding even crazier than usual”, which indicates she’s on the side of the baddies.
But we don’t doubt Sara. We know she has to punch and kick all the bad guys in the face and blow some shit up before she gets what she is entitled to.
But then there’s something about consulate staff dealing drugs. Maybe they’re in on Joshua’s kidnapping? Then there’s a Belarusian model / refugee who’s there for reasons… maybe she’s in on it? And all the staff want to shoot Sara in the face. Are they all in on it, or is it just that they’re Americans, and feel like every problem can be solved with a bullet in the face?
Jeanne is very believable and feral in her action scenes, some of which are solid, like an extended sequence where they try to make it look like one shot as she runs from room to room beating various people up, but some of it looks a bit sloppy. Also, because she’s heroic, and it’s her son she wants back, not revenge, she gets to kill absolutely no-one, so that’s not very cathartic. It is way too long for what it is, and has too many sequences of mooning. I get that she misses her dead boyfriend, but we never got to know him, so perhaps we don’t miss him as much.
That’s our loss, may his memory be a blessing. If the flick is implausible, it’s implausible in the way that every single one of these gloriously stupid Die Hard knock-offs is implausible. Have you ever had long slivers of glass penetrate the skin of your feet multiple times, and yet afterwards not only can you walk on your Christ-like wounds, but you kill all the bad guys and shoot Alan Rickman off of the top of the Nakatomi Plaza? Or was it only plausible when Bruce Willis did it in a wifebeater singlet and barefoot?
All these flicks depend on a willing suspension of disbelief. It’s the filmmaker’s job to get us to do it. If we can’t do it, the flick doesn’t work. I am in the (unenviable) position of happily suspending the last shreds of my disbelief because otherwise I will become one of those dried-up miserable old guys yelling at clouds and posting online about how something wasn’t believable in something because NO WOMAN COULD I think you get the idea.
From the amount of baffling incel commentary online about this flick or any flick with women in it you would get the impression that the concept of “acting” is a new one to certain people, and that they, apart from getting very warm in the pants whenever they see The Rock or Statham or Stallone on screen back in the day, they must think these guys actually kill people for reals in movies and on the tv, hence how believable it all must be when they do it, and no-one else.
Yes, that must be it. If the flick has a bigger problem, it’s that it recalls Die Hard less than it recalls the Jodie Foster starring Flight Plan, which similarly had a mum in a particular location being gaslit into thinking maybe she just imagined her kid after her kid is similarly kidnapped by people for nefarious reasons.
I didn’t love that flick, and being reminded of it made me a little sad, but also made me wish Jodie Foster was in more movies currently, because she’s great. Where was I, yes, this was entertaining enough, but disposable, and it’s unlikely I’d ever watch it again. But I enjoyed it enough, and it was not in any way a joyless slog like some of the latter John Wick flicks.
It’s just okay. It’s okay for flicks to just be okay, and to not give me headaches like whatever it is that Tom Hardy has been doing lately.
6 times I would have liked more scenes where people are just hanging out in the cafeteria out of 10
--
“I underestimated you.” – it’s what every mother always hears - Exterritorial
- 138 reads