In 1999, ‘Run Lola Run’ Saw the Future. Rereleased 25 Years Later, the Film Is More Exhilarating Than Ever
07.06.2024 - 06:19
/ variety.com
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Of all the heady-cool, matrix-of-reality, the-digital-future-is-now movies released in 1999, “Run Lola Run” may have been the 1999iest. Sure, “The Matrix” was the sci-fi landmark that bullet-timed audiences into the 21st century. But science-fiction movies have always looked ahead.
That’s their job. (Maybe the first true movie of 1999 was “2001: A Space Odyssey.”) “Run Lola Run” was a candy-colored punk Berlin fantasia set in this world, and that was its glory. The movie is being rereleased, starting Friday, June 7, in a new 4K version to mark the 25th anniversary of its release in America.
(It came out in Germany the year before.) And what a difference a quarter of a century makes! The days of our lives now run on digital kinetic energy. Our imaginations hum and click to the mutating magic of technological possibility. When we don’t like reality, we reset it.
“Run Lola Run” foresaw all that, incarnating it in a cinematic fable of destiny that felt like a three-part video game that was playing you. And yet…there’s an innocence, an analog urgency built into the film’s existential pop-art futurism that can make you feel weirdly nostalgic. Lola, played by the indelible Franka Potente, who’s like Lili Taylor with the flaming red hair of a new-wave knockoff of the god Hermes, has just 20 minutes to save her boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu).
At 12:00 noon, he has to make a payoff of 100,000 Deutschmarks to his underworld boss. But he left the money in a shopping bag on a subway train, where it was taken by a vagrant. So he’s now at a payphone calling Lola, who failed to meet him at the pick-up spot.