You would think that the story of a former East German swimming champion who escapes to the West as The Wall is going up, and then takes it upon himself to bring out as many of his captive countrymen as possible with an ambitious tunnel-digging scheme, would require little dramatic embellishment. All the requisite elements are already in place, after all: absolute moral imperatives, the fear of betrayal, an unambiguous oppressor and the prospect of freedom as reward.
A pity, then, that Richter's film is a hack-job: it simplifies the bad guys, improbably collates and compresses its plot milestones and turns a desirable verisimilitude of events into cartoonish hokum. None of which, you might say, is exactly uncommon in the documentary facsimile field. But it really wasn't needed here.
4/10
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