“… is really funny, or really boring there is never a middle ground.”

Look Who’s back is a German satire film that revolves around Hitler waking up in 2014 Berlin. The film is based off of a book of the same name, but today we are going to focus on the movie. Essentially, Hitler gets discovered by a freelance cameraman who takes him television station, and then Hitler gets put on national television. The joke of the movie is that nobody realizes that this is the real Hitler, and quickly begin to praise and love him.

So I’m just going to come out and say that this movie reminded me a lot of the movie Borat. I’m not sure if this film used real people who weren’t scripted (though I believe they did because of all of the facial blurring that occurs), but either way the film shows Hitler interacting with “real” people and we get to see those reactions and what they say. Honestly, this was the most surprising part of the movie to me because I thought it was very much frowned upon (to put it lightly) in Germany to bring up Hitler or Nazis let alone dress up as Hitler and parade around the country. Again, if it turns out that this entire movie was scripted then they fooled me! With that being said, a big pitfall of this movie is the filmmakers not realizing that just being Hitler isn’t funny. Sure there are instances where we get to see Hitler reacting to new technology and other things that elicit a funny reaction, but other times it is just Hitler doing regular stuff which isn’t really funny. While on the topic of comedy I want to point out that this movie has highs and lows. Sure that may be true of all movies, but Look Who’s back is really funny, or really boring there is never a middle ground. Part of that comes from the fact that the movie seems to lose focus a couple of times throughout the film. I mentioned in my summary that Hitler becomes a television star, but that doesn’t happen until almost halfway through the movie. The first half of the movie consists of these ‘Borat’ like skits that hold no importance once the narrative actually kicks in. Also, there were quite a few “side stories” that were completely pointless and very boring to watch. I chose to watch this movie to see Hitler doing Hitler things in modern day, I don’t really care about everyone who isn’t Hitler (reading that back makes me sound like a terrible person). The movie also seems to have no point until the ending of the film (which felt rather tacked on). Throughout the entire film Hitler is just doing his thing, going on television and making people laugh and then eventually making a movie (which we will get to), and then right at the end it is revealed that he does in fact want to try to take over the world (or at least Germany) again. Maybe I’m just stupid enough to let Hitler’s puppy-dog act fool me like it did many others in the film. So the movie gets really weird when it takes a drastic “meta” turn when Hitler writes a book entitled “Look Who’s Back” (but of course the title is in German). The book then gets turned into a movie, and we essentially get to watch the movie that we are watching get made. Ya, it’s confusing and it doesn’t fit the plot at all. Couple that with the shitty ending (that I won’t spoil here), and the tacked on after credits sequence that seemed to be thrown in because the filmmakers realized that they had lost sight of the point of the film, and you ultimately have a movie that isn’t very good.

Overall Look Who’s back is movie that will have you on the floor with laughter, and then so bored that you’re praying for it to be over soon. It is a classic fish out of water story that unfortunately loses focus many times throughout.

I give Look Who’s Back a C