Soundless
screened at 2005 Philly Film Festival, a great hi-tech and cleanly developed crime thriller...worth looking into.Soundless
aka: Lautlos
Germany 2004, 96 min
Director: Mennan Yapo
This German thriller about a hit man who falls in love with his intended victim is filled with high-tech gadgets and exciting action sequences — but it truly excels with its excellent performances and astute portraits of the characters’ inner worlds.
This thoroughly entertaining and engaging crime thriller offers a decidedly Teutonic twist to the time-honored tale of the assassin with a heart of gold. Viktor (Joachim Król) is the consummately professional hit man, working with infallible, machine-like precision: he always hits his target and he never gets caught. But when bizarre circumstances cause him to cross paths with the emotionally fragile Nina (Nadja Uhl), something warm punctures the veneer of Viktor’s usually cold and emotionless conscience. Love — the downfall of many a cinematic hero — has seeped into the life of this otherwise heartless, calculating superhuman killing machine. But fear not, for this is no blathering lovefest; under Mennan Yapo’s confident direction, Viktor and Nina maintain their icy exteriors and embark on a plan to escape their mottled pasts, right up to the thrilling denouement. Soundless delivers all the goods we’ve come to expect from the genre, from car chases and high-tech gadgetry to heart-pounding action sequences, but what sets it above the competition is Yapo’s attention to his characters’ inner struggles, and his painstaking attention to detail as he fills in their fascinating backstories. Following in the cinematic footsteps of Jean Reno in The Professional, Król (whom many will recognize from Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run and The Princess and the Warrior) does a superb job of winning over the audience’s sympathies with his emotionally complex portrayal of a dangerous yet alluring desperado. (German with English subtitles) -- Eric Moore
posted by DMKN @ 11:20 AM
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