Run Lola Run

Run Lola Run is pure cinema at its most maddening and invigorating, a giddy exercise in overkill combining welcome bursts of audacity with a largely who-cares narrative. It opens with a crisis faced by Lola (henna-haired Franka Potente) and her luckless boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bliebtreu), a smuggler's courier who has lost 100,000 marks of his boss's money. Manni has exactly twenty minutes to hand over the money, sending Lola on a sprint to raise the missing cash that could end any number of ways depending on a few vagaries of chance--a stumble on the stairs here, a moment's hesitation there. Writer/director Tom Tykwer takes us down three of these potential alternate realities (à la Blind Chance and Sliding Doors), a gimmick that works better than you might expect thanks to surprising twists and a welcome flippancy in Tykwer's gloss on the heavy subjects of fate and destiny. Occasionally, however, it all just seems a bit much: collisions of animation, video and still images occur primarily because they can, and surrealist touches, such as Lola's ability to shatter glass with her voice, are a befuddling distraction. Still, the sheer momentum of Tykwer's techno-pop-fueled direction makes the film an appealing jolt to the system, even if it's all ultimately auteurist eye candy. Recommended. (S. Renshaw)