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Slowly it dawns on the aggro huntsmen in the Vienna "Tatort" (including Klaus Drescher): Someone has rummaged through their steroids
Photo: Hubert Mican / ORF / ARD
"It's funny when you're into cars and get run over by the train," said this Viennese "crime scene" once.
The sarcasm of the investigators, which is already well played out in the Austrian crime novel, has an almost athletic expression in the new episode, it seems as if the investigators, who have become doughy from beer, schnitzel and meat loaf, want to stand up to those who interrogate and shadow them with their sayings : the fitness gorillas of a suspicious sports studio.
Muscles against the mouth.
One of the fitness gorillas - the one who loves cars - was hit by a train on a lonely track during the night.
It turns out he was sedated beforehand.
Now his well-defined body is separated in two clean halves on the forensicer's stretcher.
The dismantled murder victim was a James Bond fan and drove an Aston Martin like his idol.
An expensive car for someone who was registered as unemployed.
Fellner (Adele Neuhauser) and Eisner (Harald Krassnitzer) quickly end up with their investigations into the dubious deals that were obviously done in the sports center where the murdered man pumped.
Authentic looking bodybuilder staff
This "crime scene" belongs to the sub-genre of the gym thriller.
Where bull-necked guys meet to sweat packs and devour nutritional supplements, the plot can easily be turned into a speculative pulp movie about the dubious distribution of anabolic steroids.
This stuff is supposed to work wonders when you're training on an artillery-sized biceps.
The setting invites wildest speculations.
You saw that in "Tatort", for example in an Odenthal episode from 2016 - but then the story about the legally and medically dubious muscle building was then implausibly supplemented by the elements of German rap and selfie sex.
Pure trash.
The author-and-director duo Karin Lomot and Robert Buchschwenter are trying to move the scenario of illegally displaced body-shape substances out of the B-movie sector again.
Behind the anabolic steroids plot staged with authentic-looking bodybuilder staff, a somewhat wider scenario about social fraud opens up.
That is actually very well thought out, but at some point the beautiful timing with which the filmmakers previously staged the encounter between Muscleberg autistic and Mundwerk artists is lost.
For example, the scene in which Fellner's and Eisner's always assiduous colleague Schimpf (Thomas Stipsits) is asked to dance in the shower of the gym is being given away.
Very tough, as the zealous cop first searches the lockers until the muscle men get wind of it, only to break the other's nose.
Overall, the thriller loses its oomph the longer the plot progresses.
The dialogues become thinner, the images more striking.
That works better in Vienna's "Tatort" as a rule.
"Pumps" is the 47th episode with Harald Krassnitzer as investigator Eisner;
the actor celebrates his 60th birthday on Thursday.
Here, as a television commissioner who tends to be full, he soon refuses to drink alcohol and fatty foods in view of the well-defined body.
A rather spartan opening of the "Tatort" season 2020/2022 - party is different.
Rating:
5 out of 10 points
"Tatort: Pumpen",
Sunday, 8:15 pm, Das Erste
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