The Defeated - a film review (Netflix series)

Max und Moritz

I've been a fan of Michael C. Hall since he played the gay brother in Six Feet Under, that wonderful series about an undertaker family that had such interesting characters and plot lines.  And I liked him in Dexter, as well, where he played the crazy vigilante who seeks justice where the cops and the courts fail, chops bad guys up and dumps the pieces in the Bay. But I think he was badly miscast in The Defeated, one of Netflix's latest big productions, that bugged me no end from start to finish.

The Defeated takes place in Berlin immediately after the war, as the Russians, British, French and Americans are carving up the city into zones of occupation and trying to help the city get back on its feet. Taylor Kitsch - imagine having to go through life with that last name! - plays a Brooklyn cop - tries to; his Brooklyn accent is a total flop - who is assigned to a small Berlin police precinct - Kreuzberg, I believe.  The district's chief police officer is played by the well-known German actress, Nina Hoss, familiar to American audiences for her role in Homeland some years back. Another first-rate German actor, Sebastian Koch, plays the bad guy, the "Engelmacher" (angel-maker), who runs a stable of girls forced in this period of widespread desperation and poverty, into prostitution. Then, as if Taylor Kitsch's name wasn't noteworthy enough, there's Tuppence Middleton (no relation to Kate, the future consort of King William of England), who plays the British wife of the American Vice-Consul, a constantly falling-down drunk. Tuppence? I wonder if she has siblings named Shilling, Guinea and Ha'penny.

Sorry. I've wandered into the absurd.

Blame it on the plot of this stinker. The story line involves Brooklyn Cop Max McLaughlin (Kitsch) accepting the job of law enforcement consultant just so he can track down his brother, a U.S. soldier gone AWOL who was so freaked out by his experience at seeing what went on at Dachau that he becomes (like the Dexter character) a man driven to fix what's wrong with the world, something he does by tracking down some of the Nazis who have escaped justice, torturing and killing them - which we all get to watch in grizzly detail.

I have no problem being expected to suspend disbelief when I go to the theater or the movies. I know you have to stretch the truth sometimes to keep an audience engaged. But this thing pushes the ridiculous until it screams.  Max and his AWOL brother, Moritz, it turns out, had a German mother, who named them after Germany's best known children's story, written in verse and first published in 1865. A bit of a stretch, there, but at least conceivable. Less likely are other things, like when McLaughlin says, "Drop me off in Dahlem," and hops into the back of an army jeep and nobody questions his authority. He also dashes into a gunfight with Russian soldiers with guns ablaze. The Russians torture and manipulate, the entire city is portrayed as a giant bordello, and for some reason the AWOL brother knows the city streets in intimate detail and has access to large warehouses where he has set up elaborate torture machines, and then leaves notes for his brother and copies of Max und Moritz with addresses, which Max then hops in a car and drives directly to. Despite his role as a cop, Max cleans up after his brother's brutalities because he once swore on a copy of Max und Moritz to be ever true. Gimme a break.

It's the violence, mostly, that bothers me, even more than the absurdity of the plot, the cheap reduction to character types, and the sheer number of coincidences. Such good actors, such good staging - the rubble everywhere is pretty convincing - so much potential for a much better drama. All squandered.

I watched it to the end. The Germans speak in Berlin dialect most of the time. That's fun to listen to. But also a bit of a stretch.

I'm now asking myself if this isn't some sort of snobbery on my part. Some sort of phony sanctification of that period of history with which I feel so personally connected. I don't mind their making historical fiction (well, I do, truth be told) of this time period. But couldn't you do a better job of it?

Netflix streaming

photo of Max and Moritz from Wikipedia