The Robber (2010)

Touches You

good back-story, and good acting

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

This movie was a snore bore. I was falling to sleep seconds into the movie. Bring your pillow and twenty cups of hot black coffee to stay awake. A dull, listless and boring deadbeat gets out of prison, runs in races and for fun robs banks. All he does the entire film is stare off into space and utters thirty words the whole movie. Somehow, without any words said, and without even a smirk, the robber manages to start a love affair with a beautiful woman who is as boring and dull as he is. The whole film is flat and boring. It has no life to it. It tries to take itself too seriously. A real stinker. Pass the no dose, I am about to fall to sleep.

"Der Räuber" is a crime thriller from 5 years ago directed by Benjamin Heisenberg (his third feature film) and starring Andreas Lust, who gives a quietly convincing performance here. Heisenberg also wrote the script together with Martin Prinz who wrote the novel that this film is based on. Admittedly, Lust also plays a very interesting character: a restless man who, after being released from jail, shines as a marathon runner and moonlights as a bank robber. And always, he keeps running and just can't be stopped. He does not have any emotional connections initially, but finally finds a woman who loves him, even after she finds out what he does. However, she is also the one who finally tells the police after she is worried they might shoot him during his flight. So, when he was finally ready to open himself to another person, he gets betrayed again. Still, he calls her at the end when he realizes it's almost over.There are some intense scenes in here. In many scenes he threatens to shoot people if they won't let him flee in their cars. In one scene he kills his probation officer with a marathon trophy, maybe the most intense scene of the film and also an interesting connection between his two lives. This movie is a pretty good character study from the psychological point of view and I recommend watching it. With its 100 minutes, there were hardly any moments where I felt it dragged. Good job from everybody involved with this project.

The movie provided me with a change of scenery but not much else. The story is of a marathon runner/bank robber who while out on parole goes back to his old tricks.The film is slow moving I guess that is called minimalist...little dialogue and frankly somewhat grey and boring like winter in Vienna until he kills his parole officer and a chase ensues (there is one other chase in a bank robbery which helped too spark some interest too).Otherwise boring.Cinematography and acting are up to par it is the story or script that lags...not in an annoying way but in a boring way.....anyway after much thought I give it a 5. Crack a whip over some writers and add some fiction as other reviewers suggested and it could have been a lot better.Don't really recommend

Austrian-German co-production, Der Räuber (The Robber, 2010), based on the real events, tells the story about the long-distance runner, who could've lived a decent life, having a loving and caring girlfriend, a solid place to stay, and an extraordinary talent for long-distance running that he could've easily made a good living on, but instead, he additionally specializes and excels in bank robbing, becoming an addict of such an unusual activity for no other obvious reason but for possible "beauty of a criminal campaign" and adrenaline rush received along. (He's hinted times and again that he couldn't have cared less about the stolen money itself, by jamming it into black rubbish plastic bags, as if he was going to trash it.) One of those life stories that you cannot help but get unpleasantly amazed with how all the reasonable prerequisites for a good life, though inexplicably, yet seemingly so unnecessarily, get flushed down the drain, apparently faithfully presented in the movie with understandable, ergo acceptable lack of intention to ease the answers to the hard whys.