User reviews

The beginning of this Schimanski is really great: Thanner and Schimanski are walking through demonstrating people, who smack and are smacked up by the police. They both don't care about it and just walk right trough it, to the place of crime (the "Tatort"). They are the real Kings of Cool, Travolta go home.

Apart from this, the movie seems like the try to make a TV movie a cinema picture, what doesn't work. The action does not fit into the story and so on.

5/10

PS: Charles Brauer plays the bad guy, but he is lot more convincing as "Brocki" in his later "Tatorts" together with Manfred Krug, on the other side of the law.

In the beginning of the 80s the Horst schimanski character gave the long running Tatort series a new lease of life. Instead of old men in suits solving crime at a fairly slow pace, we now had foul mouthed hard hitting Horst Schimanski. The shows were usually shown on Sunday night and on Monday the German press would go on about how often he had used the word "shit"- as a policeman on German TV you just didn't do that sort of thing in the 80s. The character was so successful that two of his adventures were actually produced for the cinema without the budgetray restraints of a TV show which often showed in Schimnanski- action is more expensive than detection. However, although Zahn um Zahn looked good and had some really great secnes and action sequences, the bigger budget was not translated into quality. You get the impression that there is no real story but more of an excuse to string the scenes together and send Schimanski to exotic places. The other thing about the film is that inspite of the bigger budget it is un unprecedendet orgy in product placement. The cast is very good: charles Brauer as ice cold villain, Renan Demirkan as love interest and of course George himself. Although George is one of the finest German actors ever, he doesn't show it in the Schimanski films, there is nothing subtle about his acting as opposed to other tatort Kommissars at the time like Klaus Schwarzkopf, Horst Michael neutze (never very popular though) or Walter Richter.