"Das Blut der Templer" or "Blood of the Templars" or "Code of the Templars" is a German small screen movie from 2004, or actually it is a mini-series that consists of 2 episodes of slightly over 90 minutes each, which means the entire thing runs for roughly 3 hours and 10 minutes. The director is Florian Baxmeyer, who made this movie quite shortly after scoring an Oscar nomination for his short film work. And while his direction is sometimes pretty solid and not the main problem of this project here, it becomes obvious at times that this transition in terms of run time may just have been too much. But the most embarrassing thing is that no less than four writers worked on adapting the Wolfgang Hohlbein novel for the screen here and this is a perfect example of too many cooks spoiling the broth. Then again, i have not read the novel, so maybe it sucks there already. No idea. But the problem here start right away with lead actor Mirko Lang, who is completely miscast. He was way too old for the role here and in addition to that, he is also not a gifted actor at all. It would be accurate to call him (physicallly) a poor man's Jesse Eisenberg and let me say that I don't even see much talent in Eisenberg either. As for the supporting cast, Franke, Herforth, Krassnitzer and Masucci may be good enough for Bergdoktor and Tatort garbage or mediocre action comedies, but that's it mostly, even if Masucci's Hitler wasn't bad recently. They have recognition value, but they don't have range really.
As for the female protagonists, at least they were easy on the eyes and admittedly they weren't worse than their male counterparts either. Not that this means they are any good. People who like blondes may enjoy Flemming and there is no denying that Alicja Bachleda was probably among the most beautiful women on the planet at that time. Colin Farrell would agree. But it's difficult to cheer for her in the inevitable getting-together with the male central character as he is so limited, so simple and so not ready for the part. Yes, Mirko Lang is also hurt by the film's writing on more than one occasion, but there are more than enough scenes where an actually talented actor could have used his range to elevate the mediocre material and he never succeeds with that mission as bland as it gets. The kissing scene is still among the best the film has to offer, even if it was a really wild kiss admittedly for a first-timer. Then the villains, oh yeah, they look like worn-out emo losers at times and you can't really blame the actors, the make-up department totally messed up there. And still this is a case of style over substance, exactly what you'd expect if you hear ProSieben working on an adventure movie with religious background that runs for over 3 hours. The only epic thing here is how epically boring and uninteresting it all was. This film has no right to take itself as seriously as it did. from start to finish. It is still not a failure on the level of "Die Wanderhure", but it is quite weak in its very own right. I don't recommend checking it out.
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