Ruby Red (2013)
4/10
All in all, this was a failure
27 November 2015
Warning: Spoilers
"Rubinrot" is a German 2-hour movie from 2 years ago. The not too experienced Katharina Schöde adapted Kerstin Gier's novel for the big screen here. The director is Felix Fuchssteiner and his most known achievements until then were basically for German television soap opera "Verbotene Liebe", which tells a lot. This is not a good film. It attempts to be so much in terms of drama, fantasy, mystery and even comedy on some occasions. And it is a perfect example of what happens when the cast and crew simply do not have the talent to make a movie that works in these areas. I don't want to be too harsh on lead actress Maria Ehrich here, but I did not feel she was giving a memorable performance here. However, her efforts were hurt a lot by the bad script. Same goes for the male lead Jannie Niewöhner. And at least they are still very young and can still improve in her careers. I am not so sure if this applies to Veronica Ferres, Uwe Kockisch and even Kostja Ullmann, who have been mostly weak, sometimes mediocre for decades now.

I do not want to go into detail about the weakest moments and scenes in this film, but there was a lot. The dialogs were horrible from start to finish. the story was predictable and everything something unexpected happened, it felt completely unrealistic, like Niewöhner's character being stronger than 2 grown-up men who try to keep him from running away on one occasions. There are many really good German films these days, but this one here is not even mediocre. It's vomit-inducing to see there already is a sequel out, based on another book by the author and made by the same people like this first film. And what is even worse, there will be a third film in 2016. It may be a valid point to say this is a film mostly for teenage audiences, probably rather girls than boys, but I instead would like to say this is a film for people who have really no aspirations in terms of watching quality films. "Rubinrot" is a very weak movie and closer to a */***** than to a ***/*****. Also it has many scenes that added almost nothing to the film. The characters were written stereotypically with complete lack of creativity. I do not recommend this one. Absolutely not.
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