Spoonatects Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Clarissa Mora The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Jemima It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

angelsunchained This movie was a snore bore. I was falling to sleep seconds into the movie. Bring your pillow and twenty cups of hot black coffee to stay awake. A dull, listless and boring deadbeat gets out of prison, runs in races and for fun robs banks. All he does the entire film is stare off into space and utters thirty words the whole movie. Somehow, without any words said, and without even a smirk, the robber manages to start a love affair with a beautiful woman who is as boring and dull as he is. The whole film is flat and boring. It has no life to it. It tries to take itself too seriously. A real stinker. Pass the no dose, I am about to fall to sleep.

Aristides-2 I could easily have given this film an 8 or 9 if the writer/director Heisenberg had come up with an original fictionalized story. But he didn't. Instead he took a series of historically real events dealing with an Austrian named Johann Kastenberger, who not only was a long distance runner of note in his country but was as well a compulsive bank robber. He then sanitized the story of this vicious sociopath, who not only murdered one person (and not his annoying parole officer by the way) but is suspected of murdering 3 others. If this movie had been based on fiction then my high rating would be made by the fact that I have never been so engrossed by such a minimalist movie. All of the aesthetic choices Kastenberger made that support existential minimalism are pitch perfect. Fellow reader, make the effort and read the history of Johann Kastenberger. Heisenberg clearly didn't want to make yet another movie about a compulsive and cruel robber/murderer so he took the real character and subtracted virtually all the idiosyncratic elements of Kastenberger's persona to give us the enigma in the film. Too bad cause Heisenberg clearly knows how to use all the crafts a director needs to make visually fascinating movies.

Ben Larson I have always found runners and cyclists to be a strange lot. Why would they devote hours of their time to sweating except to get some kind of a rush similar to drug addicts?This film shows that life clearly, as Johann (Andreas Lust) gets out of prison and, rather than seek a life of fame and glory as a long distance runner and settle down with a woman who loves him, he pursues a life of crime. He is seeking the same or a higher rush that he gets from running.He doesn't quit running, but uses it to aid in stealing. It's never about money, as we never see him spend any. He just stores thousands of Euros under his bed. He even maintains a blank look as Erika (Franziska Weisz) tries to get some emotion out of him. His life is wrapped up in the rush he gets from stealing.Both primary actors gave very good performances in a film that had you on the edge as time ran out for Johann.

Davor Blazevic Austrian-German co-production, Der Räuber (The Robber, 2010), based on the real events, tells the story about the long-distance runner, who could've lived a decent life, having a loving and caring girlfriend, a solid place to stay, and an extraordinary talent for long-distance running that he could've easily made a good living on, but instead, he additionally specializes and excels in bank robbing, becoming an addict of such an unusual activity for no other obvious reason but for possible "beauty of a criminal campaign" and adrenaline rush received along. (He's hinted times and again that he couldn't have cared less about the stolen money itself, by jamming it into black rubbish plastic bags, as if he was going to trash it.) One of those life stories that you cannot help but get unpleasantly amazed with how all the reasonable prerequisites for a good life, though inexplicably, yet seemingly so unnecessarily, get flushed down the drain, apparently faithfully presented in the movie with understandable, ergo acceptable lack of intention to ease the answers to the hard whys.