Pljacka Treceg rajha

I refused to see this movie when it came out, because all the comments I read were awful. Lately, it came out on DVD and a friend bought it, so I decided to spend a boring Monday evening on it. I shouldn't have. It's one of the worst movies ever made. I don't know how they managed to get some top actors like Dragan Nikolic and Bata Paskaljevic? But, even they were very very disappointing!!! I will rather not mention the others, for example Katarina Radivojevic, who had, I guess, the hardest time of her lifetime trying to act and remember the sentences learned in German. I really don't know why they made the movie (most of it) in German? No one of the actors is a native German speaker, and for someone who is familiar with this language it's impossible to watch this movie without thinking seriously of suicide or eating the DVD cover. Furtheron, the movie looks pretty cheap, and you can see air-conditions in the back ( 1941 ), modern glass buildings, even children wearing Nike sneakers!?! All in all, don't throw away 1 h 30 min of you life. Watch a good movie for a second time or read something. Believe me, you'll feel much better if you don't know how stupid movies there are in the world.

After I recently saw it, I now believe this is a comedy made for the younger teens. In some cultures, the language used may not be considered appropriate for teens in general, but every other aspect of it points to this conclusion about the target audience.

Playing on stereotypes about the Nazis, simple jokes that can be funny to the above mentioned audience and utterly unrealistic, yet funny characters. In my opinion, not that good, but not such a bad movie either. Partly reminiscent of the old French comedy movies about the Nazis, but no match for the humor of the legendary British Allo Allo.

Acting quality varies wildly between the actors: Katarina Zutic, for example, offers a pretty poor performance, while Nikolic offers a better presentation.

I can't believe how bashed this movie is. Many reviews consider it one of the worst domestic movies overall. The fact is that there are many flaws from the technical point of view. In some scenes we can see modern buildings, children wearing Nike, air conditioners and similar things that didn't exist back during WWII. But believe me, I didn't notice any of that while watching it for the first time. Only after I read about it online and played the movie again I saw these oversights. Why didn't I notice those quite serious mistakes first time? Because movie is so entertaining that all of my attention was focused on characters and their adventures, and even if there were spaceships or dinosaurs in the background I believe I would fail to notice them. Guys, this is Serbia. Budgets are tragicomic and you can't expect Berlin scenes to actually be shot in Berlin, or complete fake town from those times, or Marvel-like CGI. This is shot more like theater play. We are where we are, we managed to get some basic props and let's go make this movie. Objections to screenplay, acting or directing are acceptable, but stop bashing low-budget movies because of cheapness and lousy production. Or show us how it can be done better in given circumstances.

Story is good and interesting. Dragan Nikolic and Nikola Djuricko are Bighead and Picklock, two burglars who consider themselves artists of the robbery. When Germany occupied Belgrade, they cunningly manage to get out of jail, get the papers and go out to rob the bank in the very heart of the Third Reich. Nikolic and Djuricko are great. Katarina Zutic, Isidora Minic and Katarina Radivojevic didn't shine but they are good enough for light comedy. The only serious objection to acting is that half of the movie is in German and all actors are domestic and even to me, who doesn't know single word of German language, they sound quite unconvincing. German speakers claim that most of the actors have learned their German lines by heart and they speak shamefully bad. All right, I can take this remark as a serious disadvantage of the film, but us, who do not speak German, this will not bother too much.

All in all, I enjoyed the film very much and I consider it one of the few domestic flicks of the 21st century that does not disgrace tradition of cult films of the eighties and nineties. This, of course, is not at the level of the Marathon Family or the Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, but it's far above almost all the domestic films I've been watching since 2000.

8/10