"Der Clown" is the movie version of the German TV series by the same name, running quite successful from 1996 to 2001. The series was about some guy who is officially dead but in truth is sitting in his hideout, waiting for the bad guys to move. Whenever something is seriously wrong, he'll put on a clown mask and go rampage, vigilante style. So far, so good, on to the Big Screen...
A merry bunch of bad guys with hockey masks wants to steal the German gold reserves. The guy who once was the Clown has retired after his girlfriend was killed in action, but now it's time for him to take his costume out of the vault, put on the smelly rubber mask again and kick some bad butt.
Boy, this has gone wrong. Big time trash bonanza! First of all, it was not shot on 35 mm, it does not even look like 16 mm, I have a certain feeling that they did it on video. Bad video, that is, with the predominant colours being red (explosions, the actors' faces) and grey (everything else). It looks terrible, but on the other hand, that fits quite well with about all other aspects of this production. The movie desperately tries in every scene to imitate big loud Hollywood action flicks (which is absolutely okay), but obviously the makers neither have the talent nor have they understood anything (not okay). Every five minutes there is a big, red (you know, video) explosion or something, our heroes escape one way or the other, with always the same pathetic piece of score. I would accept that those scenes do not have any kind of emotional impact, but the movie does not even work as an entertaining no-brainer, never! And whose fault is this? Yes. Send in the director, writer, editor and all the other clowns responsible for this catastrophe! May they lower their red video faces in shame!
The screenplay was obviously written by a chimp that was tied to a typewriter. It reveals a total lack of sense for pace, logic, characters, dialog, you name it. There is absolutely no storytelling. You could zap into this crap every time, stay with it for five minutes and change the channel again, without the feeling that you're missing something before or after what you just watched, it has made-for-TV written all over (Afterwards I even had problems to summarize the story at all...). This terrible excuse for a script is turned into an uninspired, uninterrupted inferno of hectic, shaky shots. Honestly, I saw home movies that had more virtuosity than this. Heck, not even the action sequences look good! The most annoying thing however is the extensive, completely unmotivated use of time warps and split screen effects throughout the whole movie (I don't mean two or three times, it is in almost EVERY scene). And for those who are still with us: The sound mixing is the worst I was forced to listen to in years. Bad, bad, bad!
But I wouldn't say that it is not entertaining. "Der Clown" features tons of incredible, unintentionally funny moments, e.g. a stunt, where at least a dozen burning police cars fly through the cloud of an explosion (red, of course) on a highway. Yes, this is a cool stunt. No, it is by no means a tragic, emotional scene which would maybe, and only maybe, justify the use of slow motion and pathetic syntheziser strings for two long minutes. It however gets really, really tasteless when the main character has a flashback of how his girlfriend died. This is edited like a music video, with the lethal bullet entering the girl's body within the rhythm of the music. My god, what were they thinking??
If you're into trash and maybe even survived last year's moron fiesta "Daniel Der Zauberer", this is definitely a must see. If not, be warned. You'll probably feel the urge to go rampage afterwards, vigilante style.
