Run Lola Run (1998)
Directed by Tom Tykwer
Lola receives a phone call from her boyfriend Manni. He lost 100,000 DM in a subway train that belongs to a very bad guy. She has 20 minutes to raise this amount and meet Manni. Otherwise, he will rob a store to get the money. Three different alternatives may happen depending on some minor event along Lola's run.
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9 films that influenced Run Lola Run
What critics say influenced Run Lola Run
Run Lola Run will be compared to many other titles like: Rashomon (1950), Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blind Chance (1981), Night on Earth (1992), Groundhog Day (1993), Pulp Fiction (1994), last year's Sliding Doors , and the recent titles Go and Twice Upon a Yesterday , as well as episodes of "The X-Files."
Compared to the alternate scenarios envisioned in "Sliding Doors" or "Blind Chance," "Run Lola Run" comes across as pedestrian and it stretches credibility that in a mere 20 minutes Lola can run from her home to her father's office and then to Manni; it looks like she's been running for hours.
Blind Chance, finished in 1981 but withheld from release for six years, goes off something of a metaphysical deep end, though its structure was innovative enough to provide inspiration (if that's the word) for Sliding Doors and Run Lola Run.
Run Lola Run will be compared to many other titles like: Rashomon (1950), Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blind Chance (1981), Night on Earth (1992), Groundhog Day (1993), Pulp Fiction (1994), last year's Sliding Doors , and the recent titles Go and Twice Upon a Yesterday , as well as episodes of "The X-Files."
Run Lola Run will be compared to many other titles like: Rashomon (1950), Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blind Chance (1981), Night on Earth (1992), Groundhog Day (1993), Pulp Fiction (1994), last year's Sliding Doors , and the recent titles Go and Twice Upon a Yesterday , as well as episodes of "The X-Files."
The device of playing with time will remind some of Pulp Fiction (and so will Lola and Manni), and also of Jim Jarmusch's brilliant Night on Earth.
It is not as imaginative as "Groundhog Day," but then again, few films are.
Run Lola Run will be compared to many other titles like: Rashomon (1950), Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blind Chance (1981), Night on Earth (1992), Groundhog Day (1993), Pulp Fiction (1994), last year's Sliding Doors , and the recent titles Go and Twice Upon a Yesterday , as well as episodes of "The X-Files."
The "time loop" plot has been done before, in some cases more successfully, in films like "Groundhog Day" and the TV Shows "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and "The X-Files".
You’ve seen this “what if” story structure conjured in numerous films (most notably Groundhog Day and Sliding Doors), and the philosophy always amounted to the same thing: since our destinies are pre-ordained, what’s the use fighting life’s crapshoot?
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Run Lola Run will be compared to many other titles like: Rashomon (1950), Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blind Chance (1981), Night on Earth (1992), Groundhog Day (1993), Pulp Fiction (1994), last year's Sliding Doors , and the recent titles Go and Twice Upon a Yesterday , as well as episodes of "The X-Files."
The device of playing with time will remind some of Pulp Fiction (and so will Lola and Manni), and also of Jim Jarmusch's brilliant Night on Earth.
While "Run Lola Run" is in part a "High Noon" with a raffish punk attitude, given that Lola's 20-minute journey is shot in real time, it's to be expected that when that timeis up this film still has any number of surprises to reveal.
As essential in its own way as Anton Karas' celebrated zither work was to "The Third Man," "Lola's" music is perfectly suited to the film's aims and just about addictive in its throbbing, insinuating rhythms.
The movie would have been unthinkable prior to the age of MTV and Tarantino, Oliver Stone and Trainspotting.
Superficially similar to Danny Boyle's Trainspotting and Doug Liman's Go, Run Lola Run reduces eclecticism to pure impulse.
Like the opening chase scene from "Trainspotting" for 81 minutes straight, "Run Lola Run" never stops moving.
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He has screwed up some shady deal in which he was supposed to deliver a bag full of money (100,000 German marks) to a crime lord (played by Heino Ferch of the recent The Harmonists ).