Delightful German Comedy, a Laugh a Minute.

Rating: 8/10 (6 August 2005)

Who says the Germans have no humour? They are just more subtle, and often their wit is easily mistaken for grave earnestness. An example might be the German lady who approached an invading American general among the ruins of Berlin in 1945 with the words: "If only you Americans had stayed out, none of this would have happened". That must have been a joke, right?
But now, all subtlety set aside, Hirschbeigel has chosen to go all out with an unmistaken farce in "Der Untergang", about the last days of Adolf Hitler. Be prepared for side-splitting fun: two hours of Nazis suffering from the consequences of their own crimes. Goebbels' wife popping cyanide pills into her five sleeping children (a gem), a commander exploding hand grenades under his unsuspecting wife's dinner table while soup is being poured, and Hitler himself ... well, Groucho Marx, Charlie Chaplin, and Jim Carrey spring to mind as runners-up, but Adolf takes the cake. What a comedian! I laughed myself silly.
Apart from that, Hirschbeigel's movie is well-acted and masterly executed. Besides obvious slapstick (Germans having their brains blown out), the film also offers more refined jokes, such as the smoking Germans who start out by smoking outside Hitler's bunker in gentle deference to their non-smoking Fuehrer, and end up puffing away right outside his door, as his madness soars.
Here comes the SPOILER: Hitler dies in the end.
Definitely worth seeing!
PS! If you want more material on German comedy I can recommend chapter VIII of Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat", on Professor Slossenn Bosschen's great German comic song.