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Schenk (Dietmar Bär) and Ballauf (Klaus J. Behrendt): Investigations on the Rhine
Photo: Thomas Kost / WDR
Everybody prick up your ears, the captain of the pleasure boat "Agrippina" has an announcement to make: "Dear passengers, here's an asshole who wants to tell you something."
The captain is right: Daniel Huberty (Stephan Kampwirth) is actually an asshole.
The man was released from teaching a few years ago and was in prison for having an affair with a 14-year-old ward.
Now he has hijacked a pleasure boat on the Rhine near Cologne and is threatening the captain with a pistol to convince the world that he has been wronged.
On the Reparation Campaign
The hostage-taker calls on board loudspeakers for cooperation in his extremely cumbersome redress campaign and rounds up the Besoffskis at a bachelor party and Chinese tourists in the bar below decks.
A bomb with lots of colorful wires is ticking in the machine room, which he can detonate at any time using his mobile phone.
Such a hostage-taker thriller is usually a highly complex matter: while the investigators outside are on the gas to free the prisoners with sophisticated technology and daring stunts, they have to somehow come to terms with their tormentor in a confined space so that he and she remain calm not kills.
The pressure situation often leads to fraternization and fraternization, the so-called Stockholm Syndrome.
Suddenly the victim thinks he understands the perpetrator.
Ballauf goes on board
But such a kind of understanding is difficult for the anti-hero of this "crime scene" even within the richly decorated print scenario.
It is possible that the author duo Eva and Volker A. Zahn, who have some excellently written "crime scenes" in their filmography, built the plot in such a way that fraternization and twinning is out of the question anyway: Inspector Ballauf (Klaus J. Behrendt) lets embark under a false identity.
Because of his job, he is immune to Stockholm Syndrome.
While colleague Schenk (Dietmar Bär) works from the outside to break up the hostage-taking, Ballauf sabotages Huberty's plan from the inside.
Unfortunately, both approaches are so clumsy and tiresome that you soon lose faith in the Cologne police.
From time to time Schenk takes a small police boat to the excursion boat to debate over the railing with the hostage-taker – which usually gets out of hand.
And Ballauf makes himself independent with reference to alleged urological problems in the toilet passage to take a look at the bomb in the engine room.
Schipper diplomacy and prostate monologues at the urinal, that doesn't result in an energetic combination.
Captain Chaos soon takes command of the crime story's plot (director: Marcus Weiler).
It finally becomes really unbelievable when Ballauf organizes a kind of moral court martial for the perpetrator below deck with two other hostages and accuses him of his pathetic nature in order to lure him out of his reserve.
The anti-Stockholm Syndrome shoot may have seemed exciting on paper.
But in the end, this supposedly daring, cumbersome, lengthy psychological game only leads to a realization about the hostage-taker, which the captain already provided in Rhenish singsong at the beginning: The guy is a... you know.
Rating:
4 out of 10 points
"Crime scene: Huberty's revenge",
Sunday, 8.15 p.m., the first