"Killing Cars" is a West German German-language film from 1986, so it has its 30th anniversary this year. The writer and director is Michael Verhoeven who had decent success (including an Oscar nomination) with some of his Nazi-themed film in his long career. This one here is nowhere near his most or least known works, but maybe one of the films by him that weren't received that well overall. I am not sure if the cast is to blame. I like Prochnow and he is very talented for sure and there are other somewhat famous cast members in here like Senta Berger. Maybe the script is the problem. The title already gives away that this is a car-themed film. And it is basically about automobiles that are environmentally-friendly, which is something that is a pretty progressive topic and has parallels to the car industry today. But it's much more radical. The people who make lots of money from oil are not willing to accept that they will have huge losses and the consequence is every economy-related crime you can think of, even murder. Money makes the world go round, right guys? The movie runs for slightly over 90 minutes, but I guess there's different versions out there as here on IMDb it is listed at 105 minutes almost. All in all, I think the political context and the whole premise were fairly interesting, but the elaboration in detail and also the characters just did not make it a compelling watch. I also felt that the film went over-the-top on too many occasions (also in terms of acting) and that hurt the overall outcome quite a bit. Thumbs-down from me. Not recommended.
Review of Killing Cars
