Gladbeck

A story that is tragic, excruciating, devastating, gobsmacking and unforgettable.

A lesson for police and the media that in some circumstances trying to achieve a peaceful resolution to a hostage siege can place the lives of innocent people in even more peril.

As a Dutch national living in Hamburg, I am not a big fan of German TV-drama. Most productions are unrealistic, melodramatical or far too psychological. Gladbeck however is a great exception. I can only confirm other reviews, that this movie shows what actually happened, how strange the events may seem. I remember the hijacking very well, because it partly took place in the Netherlands too. The acting is superb, the production design is (almost, with just some minor errors) perfect. It shows how much fear the authorities had to take responsibilty and move to action. I hope this will set the standard for coming German TV-productions. Very good indeed!

If only police, politicians and press had known what they were doing back then - 1988 when this incident happened - as well as director Kilian Riedhoff in fact knows his job! Nothing like this would have happened! Smart and sharp edged his work is keeping the spectator in the sniper position, always observing the hostage-taker through a virtual telescope never looking away, constantly ready to fire. A brillant thriller/drama/document about a sad and disturbing true story.

The film is certainly one of the better German productions, and almost all the other reviews here are right about its positive aspects. It's shot brilliantly and the 80's production design is spot on. Sascha Alexander Gersak as Hans-Jürgen Rösner is simply incredible. Otherwise I never completely agree with most of my fellow Germans about good acting; personally I think in many cases there is a fakeness, something too staged about the way many German star actors speak. But that may be a matter of taste and it's not my point. My grievance is about the ending. Maybe I have seen some cut home entertainment version and the TV version was longer, but the decision to not continue telling the story in the same denseness than the first 85 minutes of the film and simply rushing to the end feels like a cheat. Yes, I already know the director's and producer's explanation: Everybody knows what horrible end the crisis took, everybody has seen the images of this first media-covered (in Germany) hostage crisis, so why repeat them here? Very simple: Because A) not everyone has seen the images and B) as many, many other re-tellings of real life happenings have shown, there is an indisputable fascination to seeing familiar images from a different angle never before seen. The series 'Chernobyl' comes to mind. Don't get me wrong: I don't need to see the hostages getting shot, but watching this rushed ending after sitting through nail-bitingly thrilling 85 minutes left me hollow. I also found the decision astounding: Why did they shoot all those scenes and then only use them in such a compendious way? It seems the broadcasters or producers forced the director to do so. I can't imagine he wanted it that way. Just my 10 cents.

'54 Hours' is a docu-drama reconstructing the story of a hostage crisis that took place in Germany in the 1980s. A gang of bank robbers took some people captive and hoped to use them to negotiate their freedom. The police had no desire to let them escape, but also no wish to harm the hostages, and also, it seems, no willingness to take responsibility for action, although it's unclear how bad a thing this was - one thing one learns from the story is that there were no easy answers. An amazing detail was that the kidnap was followed the whole way by the press, who actively became part of the story - long before the internet age, the crimes were played out in full public view. Some of the acting here is perfunctory, and there's a frankly silly depiction of one of the victims as an god-like icon of German beauty, but the story itself is innately interesting and complex - more so, in fact, than that of most fictional crime dramas.