June 18, 1999 | Tearing through the streets of Berlin like lightning on the hoof, Lola (Franka Potente) is a woman on a mission.
Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), her none-too-bright boyfriend, is a petty criminal with a major problem: He needs a large sum of money in 20 minutes to replace the loot he lost while taking the subway to a rendezvous with his unforgiving boss. Lola doesn’t have the cash — but maybe she can beg, borrow or steal what she needs from her banker father. Trouble is, she must get to the bank, and then to Manni, on foot. Hence the movie’s title — Run Lola Run — and the heroine’s mounting desperation.
Lola quite literally is in a race against time. Fortunately, she is so stubborn and strong-willed that, even when she loses, she can demand a rematch.
Run Lola Run is a flashy and frenetic mix of video-game logic and music-video panache, choreographed to the insistent beat of a throbbing techno-pop score. Scattered here and there amid the sensory overload are a few intriguing observations about fate, chance and determinism. Writer-director Tom Tykwer obviously wants to illustrate how everyone — Lola, Manni, innocent bystanders, passing strangers — is vulnerable to random variables that can brighten, darken or dramatically shorten one’s life. (The movie sporadically pauses for rapid-fire montages that chart the destinies of secondary characters.) But style, not substance, is Tykwer’s primary concern. At heart, Run Lola Run is a giddy celebration of moviemaking magic for its own sake, an anything-goes extravaganza that repeatedly underscores its own unreality.
Like a video-game adventuress who repeatedly returns from the dead, Lola gets three different chances to dash through her worst-case scenario. Every time she plays the game, she must traverse the same route within the same timeframe. But each journey is unique — for Lola, as well as for the people in her orbit — and each destination is markedly different.
With her punkish flame-red hair and keep-on-truckin’ body language as the go-go Lola, Franka Potente often comes across as a living-and-breathing special effect — an impression Tykwer gleefully reinforces by occasionally replacing her with an animated cartoon doppelganger. Even so, Potente never spoils the fun by winking at the audience, or otherwise acknowledging that she’s in on the joke. Rather, she plays Lola with a completely serious and surprisingly affecting intensity while conveying her fierce determination to beat the clock. Almost single-handedly, Potente provides a touch of heart and soul as counterpoint to all the dazzling sound and fury
