Tödlicher Umweg

I saw this film at the local sneak preview and, boy, it was one of the worst movie experiences I ever had. After seeing this film I was asking myself if the guys who financed this piece of junk read the script before agreeing to do so. It has so many holes it is impossible to overlook them. For example: a guy is running away from a house in the middle of the night, trying not to raise any suspicion from the other guys inside. The only problem: he is running with his flashlight turned on... The script was obviously influenced by David Fincher's "The Game" and "Big Brother", but instead of BB the authors should have watched some Hitchcock movies and read some scripts by David Mamet, that might have helped "a little" bit.

The actors... all below-average. Especially Eva Haßmann, who got many laughs from the audience for her performance, played even worse than the guys on "Gute Zeiten, Schlechte Zeiten" (a German soap opera). The entire cast gave the impression that most of the money was spent on the German voice of Harrison Ford for the dubbing process...

The music felt like from some cheap TV show. The guys who did the sound mixing need to get back to film school (or have some evening classes at Skywalker Sound): on many occasions the dialogue was too quiet, in other scenes the sound effects didn't match the events on screen (ie. you see the police car crashing down into the river, but it sounds like a giant monster truck splashing into a big lake). Editing was a little too much MTV-like.

Bottom line: this film is so unbelievably bad, you should avoid it at all cost! 1/10

...but I pretty much enjoyed this film.

yes it is influenced by (or even copies from) other pieces such as "The Game"/"The Truman Show" and the lesser known "Tabloid"/"My Little Eye". it is by no means a masterpiece (my vote of 10 was just given to outweigh the unjust all the 1 votes, I actually give it a 7-8).

but to address some points of criticism listed by the other reviewers: the directing is solid, the soundtrack/score is okay, the acting is good enough and even if the story sounds familiar, all of that adds up to a solid piece of entertainment.

its certainly better than many other indie flicks dealing with reality TV shows too, so I doubt you will regret watching it.

Don't go see it. It's that simple. This movie has it all: bad actors, a horrible script, ridiculous music. At first I was hoping, for about 20 minutes, that it might turn out to be okay. But I just couldn't take the bad acting and the ridiculouos drama a little while later. Then, after a dramatic turn, it went from being a cheap and cheesy movie to being just ridiculous. They obviously tried to copy "Das Experiment", which was a box-office hit in Germany. Sorry, I don't feel much like going into detail about the story. It's not worth it. Actually, everybody in the theater seemed to have quite a bit of fun: people started talking and laughing out loud about what they saw.