A pretty miniature is at the very beginning of this crime scenes from HR: People who wear dog masks mourn a person lying on the ground who has also put a dog mask on. Sounds silly, but in fact, in the history of the German Sunday night crime thriller, condoling mutts have never been more dignified than in this sequence, in which tragedy and comedy are balanced.
Beyond the dog’s head, Petra Lüschow’s “Whoever hesitates is dead” does not have a lot of original things in store, but a lot that can be expected. Someone is kidnapped by the masked men, the ransom should go to the (im crime scene too often seen and of course completely exaggerated) big-headed entrepreneur father. A man who likes cats and despises neighboring dogs and their owners: “Why don’t you stop anthropomorphising your stupid fools.” An im helps with the investigation crime scene now too often overworked nerdy expert, and of course the cell phone display drives the action. If nothing goes on, a name that is clearly visible to the audience lights up, as treacherous as it is flat. That the identity of the masked in a martial arts club is clarified, it was in crime scene “Drei Schlingen” also happened 44 years ago, at that time the place of knowledge was a judo club, this time it is, more contemporary, a studio for women’s self-defense courses.
But even the im crime scene – and not only in crime scene – The popularly presented course through underground labyrinths does not encourage the build-up of tension here, unlike last time in Münster, where forensic doctor Boerne lost himself in the nightmarishly long corridors of lovingly decorated limbo. In Frankfurt this time even the internal and external madness of the people has no effect on the audience. Zazie de Paris treads through the panorama as the most conspicuous undercover investigator of all time and is as pale as the investigation team Janneke / Brix (Margarita Broich and Wolfram Koch) in the entire adventure. And like all the staff, great people, but the characters grab you as little as a story that goes on and on.
So the most beautiful sentence remains in this one crime scene that of the assistant to the big-puke entrepreneur, for whom his diabetic hangover is more important than anything else: “Have you already injected Caligula with his insulin today?”
The first, Sunday, 8.15 p.m.