This review was first published in June 2019. Now the crime scene will be repeated in the first on Sunday, July 25th, which is why we are republishing the text.
This Cologne man crime scene is like a warm drink on the terrace, and when there is almost nothing left, someone puts ice cubes on it. Yes, there are briefly goose bumps at the end, no doubt, otherwise the episode “Kaputt” (director: Christine Hartmann, script: Rainer Butt and Christine Hartmann) is thematically ambitious, but extremely poorly in the implementation.
There’s no danger of spoiling this column either. Because the perpetrator, okay, he will be found – but until a conclusive lead emerges, that takes and lasts. To be precise, it takes almost 75 minutes. In the meantime, investigators Max Ballauf (Klaus J. Behrendt) and Freddy Schenk (Dietmar Bär) are speculating wildly about events that the viewer is already familiar with because, thanks to shaky images, they have a small knowledge advantage at the beginning, but that doesn’t help either .
The question is who is gradually shooting the young, broken drug users who initially beat the policeman Frank Schneider to death in an abandoned house while his colleague lay knocked out in the garden. The investigators have no idea, neither do the viewers. And the perpetrators become victims. It could be exciting. Unfortunately it is not.
As in the penultimate Cologne episode “Weiter, Immer weiter”, it is about the inner state of the police, about pressure to perform, about bullying against women and gays. “The police are family,” says Schenk. “Outwardly maybe,” replies Ballauf. “Inside, she’s just as broken as most other families.” Specifically, this means that the slain Frank Schneider and his colleague Stefan Pohl had been a couple for a long time, but when the investigators asked whether the dead man had a family, the head of the department said: No.
Max Simonischek plays Pohl, the marginalized, angry and grieving policeman, with his stately body size plays a childlike direct woundedness. Behrendt and Bär also make it all very fearless. The actors aren’t the problem here. They’re the usual rich suspects. Lectures on the precinct from the file of the broken drug user, about whom everything has long been clear anyway. And secondary characters who have to say the sentence when they hear the news of their child’s death: “That can’t be all! Tell me that it’s not true.”
But it’s true: routine boredom, only recommended for steadfast lovers of Tatort folklore.
The first, Whit Monday, 8.15 p.m.