Philadelphia Weekly

Short on ideological hand-wringing but heavy on propulsive energy, director Uli Edel’s adaptation of Stefan Aust’s nonfiction best-seller presents an exhaustive crash course in 1970s German domestic terrorism as a viciously unromanticized rock ’n’ roll rush of adrenaline. Cramming a decade’s worth of fire bombings, kidnappings, hijackings, assassinations and urban machine-gun skirmishes into a breathless two and a half hours, The Baader Meinhof Complex plays like an epic miniseries with all the boring parts cut out. 


Considering the massive quantity of information conveyed, this probably should be a starchy history lesson. Edel makes it hustle like a blockbuster action flick.

The (awful) title comes courtesy of the protagonists. First we’ve got rock star terrorist Andreas Baader, played with threatening charisma by Run Lola Run hunk Moritz Bleibtreu. A live-fast-die-young hedonist with a yen for Marxist dogma, Baader can passionately carry on at great length about the necessity of armed revolt against the imperialism of the Vietnam War. But you also get the troubling sense that he’d be pulling a lot of the same stunts even if he didn’t have a political platform to hang it on. “Nothing’s fun without a gun” and “fucking and shooting are the same things” sum up his favorite slogans.

The Lives of Others ’ Martina Gedeck stars as Ulrike Meinhof, a widely respected left-wing journalist who, in a moment of existential crisis, ditches her bourgeoisie family and leaps out a window to go underground with Baader after he turns a phony interview setup into a bloody prison break. Thus “the Baader Meinhof Gang”—as they were dubbed by the media—is born. (The group preferred to be called the Red Army Faction, or RAF, but you can’t always get what you want.)


Meinhof was largely relegated to the role of propagandist, penning manifestos and suffering crises of conscience that ever so briefly flash across Gedeck’s expressive face. The real heavy lifting, at least according to Edel and co-screenwriter Bernd Eichinger, was done by Baader’s girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin, played by Johanna Wokalek in a performance that should make her a star—or at least guarantee a stint as a Bond girl.


Wokalek’s Ensslin is the son of a preacher man, giving herself over to violent revolt with such a palpable erotic charge that even her uptight mother mentions the transformation. She makes ruthless demagoguery disturbingly hot, her sex-bomb status just another tool in an arsenal of high-caliber weapons, and her conscience a casualty of the People’s Revolution.


Eichinger’s script takes a just-the-facts-ma’am approach to this touchy topic, so much so that he and the film have been accused of glamorizing terrorism. It’s a misguided charge, as the barbarism of the RAF’s actions is never glossed over—the movie has no shortage of icky carnage. Yes, the folks committing these acts happened to be young and beautiful, which is part of why they’re still revered in certain circles, and also why such a clear-eyed treatment of the story is so necessary.


Tipping their hat to an obvious template, Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 The Battle of Algiers (also a favorite flick of the protagonists), the filmmakers cast the invaluable Bruno Ganz in a familiar role as the war-weary antiterrorism expert. He’s skilled enough to flush these kids out, but also knows such operations are stamping out symptoms instead of problems. Ganz’s speeches are the closest the movie comes to explicating today’s war-on-terror parallels, and in the hands of a lesser actor might have elicited groans.


But Edel isn’t particularly concerned with editorializing. He mostly just cares about momentum, which is why for all its formal vigor and visceral excitement, The Baader Meinhof Complex ultimately feels a bit distant. Sidelined awaiting trial for the final hour, our three protagonists remain the only fleshed out characters. Subsequent operations, which Eichinger and Edel feel compelled to document in overwhelming detail, are left to be carried out by anonymous, no less attractive commandos who appear just as quickly as they vanish from the picture.


The later reels are an expertly helmed swirl of facts and adrenalized set-pieces, but somewhere along that headlong rush, the movie’s soul goes missing. ■

Grade: B


Director: Uli Edel


Running time: 150 minutes


You’ve heard the title before because: It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2009.


If you like this film, try: The Battle of Algiers