Product: Luther [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - Germany ]
Rating: 3.0
Uninspiring but ultimately rewarding
Eric Till's Luther started badly - very badly - with a rushed prologue that felt like a bad TV miniseries (I was waiting for the voice-over: "Previously on Luther") and requires the audience's patience for the first 20 minutes or so. Till is a supremely visually unimaginative director - were it not for captions and corruption, you wouldn't know when you were in Rome or Wurtenburg and he unforgiveably makes Luther nailing his declaration on the door look like someone hurriedly putting up a shelf before making a run for the post office - and he isn't exactly helped by a script that can't be said to give John Osborne a run for his money, but ultimately it's such a good yarn that it defies the telling and picks up its own momentum. Of course, that's sometimes at the expense of some of Luther's less P.C. views - at times you definitely get the feeling that this is made by Lutherans, for Lutherans.Joseph Fiennes' performance as the turbulent priest similarly improves with the dialog and the drama (it's hard to muck up "Here I stand: I can do no other," and thankfully he doesn't) but the international cast is variable at best, although Peter Ustinov has fun as Frederick the Wise and Alfred Molina offers a nice line in selling Papal indulgences as the infamous Johann Tetsel. It is strange, though, that the more English-language films he makes, the worse Bruno Ganz's English seems to become. There's no shortage of cliches (crippled child ahoy!) and the ending feels as rushed as the beginning, but it's ultimately a surprisingly watchable slice of history.