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
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
