THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX

Welcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

 

 

Producer/co-writer Bernd Eichinger associates himself so strongly with "Downfall" (2004), the terrific Hitler biopic directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, which Eichinger produced, that audiences might be led to believe that Eichinger himself directed "Downfall" and "Baader Meinhof."

However, it's director/co-writer Uli Edel ("Last Exit to Brooklyn") who failingly struggles to corral "Baader Meinhof's" goopy screenplay into some kind of cinematic narrative shape.

Based on Stefan Aust's book about Germany's version of the SLA, called the "Red Faction Army" (RAF), the film maps out the alliance of lefty journalist Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck) with political activist Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) and his like-minded girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) in Berlin after Baader and Ensslin are arrested along with two others for setting off a bomb in a department store to protest "the genocide in Vietnam."

The small anti-capitalist-imperialism group go through bouts of prison terms and escapes, bank robberies, assassinations, bomb attacks, and petty in-fighting while other cell members plan and execute doomed hijacking and kidnapping missions.

The story devolves into a mishmash of transitory characters and locations punctuated by politically charged meetings held by Germany's anti-terrorism chief Horst Herold (well played by Bruno Ganz), speaking the narrative's theme lines regarding understanding the motives behind acts of terrorism that serve to replace bigger wars when they are not going on.

"The Baader Meinhof Complex" is a dense historic stew crammed with too many events — the RAF's seven-month Stammheim trial is barely comprehensible — and not enough context or character development to fill out what could have been a compelling film.

 
(Vitagraph Films) Rated R. 150 mins.