Plank-like Alexander Skarsgård plays a mute bartender whose girlfriend goes missing, launching him on a search for her through the city's underworld. In addition, he's Amish and therefore also technologically backward, so the search is beset with even more obstacles. Meanwhile, in a parallel story on a convergence course with his one, we follow two American black market surgeons as they torture and patch up people at a gangster's behest: Paul Rudd, doing a sort of psychotic version of Hawkeye from M*A*S*H and his paedophile friend. They are somehow meant to be likable too, and the world they're in is meant to be interesting. It is not. It's a mish-mash of pillage mostly from Blade Runner, all urban decay, neon advertising, holograms and flying cars, and wholly incongruous elements which the film does not have the intellectual rigour to bother to explain, such as the continued anachronistic U.S. military presence in the city and the co-existence of all manner of 1990s clothing and technological paraphernalia alongside the random future stuff. Just to underline how eclectic the society is, and simultaneously underline how derivative and anime-level infantile the set-up is, everyone apart from the leads has a stupid post-punk haircut and robot pole dancers get thrown in too.
It dawns on you very soon that the story being set in Germany is only for modish effect, because otherwise it's a wholly American affair, from the fundamentalist Amish background of the main protagonist to the bowling alleys and continuation of the war in Afghanistan in the news, and might as well have been set there instead. The transposition therefore really adds nothing of purpose and then it's just a pointlessly long slog through extreme violence to an unsatisfying resolution. Jones will have to pull something miraculous out of the bag next to earn trust once more.
3/10
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