So close, and yet so far away. Setdesign and location scouting is stellar - bordering on really well done. Casting in parts did its job - thats the best rendition of a Bob and Peter so far - in any of the movies around. Both teen actors are amongst the best actors in the movie in general. Shot design has flashes of true greatness, when it was planned for longer than two seconds. Pickup exposition sequences with 2D art are very well done, score was very well picked - and thats where the positive parts end.

When casting a the "Three Investigators" movie you have exactly one task you cant possibly fail at. Don't cast a pretentious, out of his depth Justus (/Jupiter) Jonas. Who's younger than the others in the trio, and then stands in the middle of the frame, feeling out of place. Because his delivery was so bad (with scenes feeling like on set he wanted to make the others crack up to get at least some positive affirmation during shooting breaks, and that had crossed over into the actual scenes) - you could see him recalling lines from memory always a few milliseconds too late, that therefore you have given most of the exposition to Bob anyhow.

Its a Justus (/Jupiter) Jonas you simply cant cast.

You can see that the stage direction was there, because in some scenes he can fill his role, and he tries his best - but then its never the default and the role never comes naturally to him. When he nails his delivery, as an actor, the boy is quite good - so its not that he doesnt have the capability, its just - that it doesnt come natural.

And its probably not so much his fault, as it is the fault of the director - because there are scenes left in the movie that would have benefited from another five takes. The shot planning, when its done quickly during 80% of the movie falls flat. You miss closeups for emotional delivery, not just for the teen actors but in general. The framing is often bad (with effort spent on getting each character centered in the image or the entire trio in a shot), character introductions sometimes are done in medium long shots, when a shot needs to breath no one told the director to move the camera out for more impact, and the dialog sequences are stale, usually complimented by stale shot, countershot cinematography.

This is then amplified by dialog that is even more stale... Characters internal motivations are glanced over and wrongly molded all the time, apparently the three investigators are pumped to be on a movieset, during the establishing minutes of their character introductions, and then pumped to see a bat-bot, and then extremely intrigued by a whole hooking sequence that just registered to the audience as weird...

... and then there is the meta-level on which the producers and the director decided, lets just make this a movie about a child trio on a movieset, and of course shoot it in Romania where it doesnt cost us as much - so now the kids are pumped to go to Romania over the summer, and of course give them some really child level edgy things to do - like you know, making filmblood - and now the children are pumped to make film blood and --

where is the plot development in all of this? Which plot development. After a full day of being pumped on a filmset about being on a movie, the three investigators wander trough an empty corridor at night - and dont you worry, a plot point will hit!

And the shot framing will be bad. And Justus' delivery will be off, and the supporting actors will be really overacting, like they were cast into a childrens movie (and thats right about their mindset during their text delivery), and the emotional reactions on screen will represent something, or someone, that we as the audience have only seen in a wide shot so far...

Supporting actors are often not very good, filler plotlines like Peters dad not having time for him in place, and then at some point, the least settled and sure of himself in the trio has to drop another plot developing line, that - the trio "must watch the empty corridor where the first plot point hit at random last night". Why?

Because strange music played. And because, apparently, aside from being pumped all the time, to be on a filmset in Romania, this also has to be a detective movie of course! So now this leads into a chase sequence!

The thing is that with its visual presentation, set design and music choices and its emotional story telling - especially in the bigger choreographed scenes, and also during the entire intro (which feels mostly rushed, probably because they booked not enough days to shoot in the US) the movie hits its mark. So someone knew what they were aiming for, and during those bigger planned scenes, the execution is there. Its just, that it falls apart during the remaining 80% of the movie.

They achieved flashes of excellence, but that in itself doesnt make a congruent or fun to watch movie.

Here we have the new German film "Die Drei ??? - Erbe des Drachen" and this pretty much means in English "The Three Question Marks - Legacy of the Dragon". You see the title already sounds truly pretentious, but we will get to that a little later. This film runs for exactly 100 minutes apparently, so for a film for kids this is already relatively long you could say, but also not super long. The director and writer here is Tim Dünschede and seeing this name I would say that I can think of another word that starts with "Dünsch" or actually "Dünnsch" with another "n" in the middle that fits the quality of this film pretty good. I am sure German can follow. If you are not a German native speaker, please go ahead and ask a German-speaking friend what I mean by that. Anyway, for Dünschede it was just the second full feature film of his career and the first was already not a big success, so I am a bit surprised he got picked here to be in charge of this one. The story comes form André Marx with his "Drei ???" connection and Dünschede's co-writer was Anil Kizilbuga and they also worked together on the other Dünschede full feature film I mentioned. But today we shall talk about this one here. The Three Question Marks are pretty popular here in Germany. I have never listened to the cassettes, but everybody knows the name and so many have listened to them over not only years, but decades really. So from this statement you already see that the characters in this film are pretty much linked to audio cassettes or nowadays maybe audio books you can say too, but not too much to the screen or big screen even. There were films before, but only one every ten years or so, which means that the child actors from one movie were pretty much grown-ups already when the next film came out. We will see if this tradition changes with this film here.

The ending definitely implied in a way that there could be more films to come, but that is no surprise honestly because everything that makes money in German theaters these days gets a sequel. And which fits the political agenda of course. There is political agenda in every single German film nowadays which is sad, but it is reality. If you bring the wrong message, you do not get any funds and most likely as a consequence your movie will not get made. I mean with the one in charge of the culture sector in the German government these days is a woman who demonstrated with the radical left in the past and asked for the abolition of Germany. That says it all. Free speech is not a thing anymore. But that is another story. This film here at least does not send many political messages which is good because the indoctrination frequently starts already with the youngest members of our society. Here the only thing that caught my attention was that they decided to cast a Black actor for a character who was friends with the kids in and a colleague of one boy's father. He could never be the bad guy or antagonist with this background in a German film. That much is safe. Anyway, you see from my rating that I despised this movie and I will tell you why. First of all, I must say that I thought that in the past 20 years, Germany struggled with film in general, but that children movies were alright. Not great, but good enough, so the disappointing quality of the outcome here is a warning sign. What was wrong with it? Mostly the script. The dialogue writing was incredibly poor here. First of all, this is not how kids talk, even if they are so much smarter than everybody else their age. I don't even want to blame the child actors there. I mean they were also not good, but nobody could have made this nonsense work.

The big name from the child actor trio here is Julius Weckauf, the kid from the Hape Kerkeling film, and we will surely see him in many more films. His charisma may keep him there, his talent I don't think so. The more I see from him, the less impressed I am, but he's still young. And I will admit that he was not as bad as Brandl and Wendt here, the other two child actors. They both had very poor moments with obvious overacting, one when he explained some connections to the other boy(s) and the other when he mocked Weckauf's character in a condescending fashion on at least two occasions. But there was more to them. More that simply wasn't good. But then again, why would the actors be good if everything else is chaos. Are we supposed to think that they did a really good job when the blood that pours out there has the right consistency? I didn't. By the way, a bit sad to see Gideon Gedeon Burkhard as part of this film. I thought he would know better. Jördis Triebel's inclusion at the end was also embarrassing, a bit disappointed in her as well, but then again not really a big surprise because you often see big-name German actors in kids' films and this has been the case for quite a while now. Only these German actors though that will never have a real international breakthrough. With Gudrun Landgrebe and Florian Lukas (who has aged a lot) I am not surprised at all that they were part of this film. I don't see any acting talent in them and they basically play the exact same character in every film they are in. Mark Waschke I am not too sure what to say about him. He was not bad admittedly, but also had almost no material to work with to be honest other than criticize the boys for being too nosy and in the end admit he was wrong all along and apologize in some fake father-son story. The boy's comment there that detectives do not have hard feelings in the long run was another woeful moment from the film in terms of dialogue writing. Waschke reminded be a bit of Jude Law here physically, which is definitely not a bad thing.

You may wonder why this film has a dragon reference in the title and the answer is a connection between the word "Dragon" and the word "Dracula". Oh well, okay I understand and not a horrible inclusion if this is really the case, but the way it was rushed in here on one brief occasion was shoddy to say the least and did not justify the film being named like this. If you don't pay attention this very moment, you will miss it and stay clueless when it comes to the film's title. Another thing I found cringeworthy here were the English names of the characters, at least two of the boys, like as if this film had any international relevance at all. I know it is the same in the books, but they could always have tried to keep the names out for the most part. Except Justus Jonas. He has a German name, the leader of the gang played by Weckauf. I mean given all this character's cringe you could say that the boy even saved the character in a way. No matter if he explains botany, knows about scientific studies linked to chocolate or elaborates on phenomena from the world of physics, it was unbearable to take to be honest. Subtlety is not this film's strength. Of course, he also gets stuck somewhere and needs his buddies' help and he manages to use an artificial bat to send a message to his buddies, so they come and save him. I don't even. When he knows exactly who is hiding there under the mask and digging for the treasure, it was also not any better. It was really easy to predict anyway it would be her then. So many bizarre moments in this film, like when they suspect the older janitor at first who never would have been capable of running like this, it was ridiculous. I counted at least another dozen very unrealistic and stupid inclusions to this film. It is indeed a mess from beginning to end. I could probably write a second 10k words about all that is wrong with the outcome here and there is no other way than to call this film a complete failure.

I also wonder what was up with this story towards the end when Landgrebe's character's brother gets some elaboration. Of course, the miracle kids find him as well. Easy peasy. And of course, after having no interest at all to return, he suddenly agrees to and goes back to the castle. And as if this was not worse enough already, we do not find out why he would not at least see Landgrebe's character. I mean he would not even have to return to the castle to do so. She would have come to visit him. Speaking of the castle, that one was quite nice, pretty much the only positive aspect here. I would love to visit it as a tourist at some point and good decision that they really filmed at Romania if I read the credits correctly. Then again, we all know who pays for the film crew's trips here, don't we? This makes it despicable again then that they invested so much (of our) money to make an abysmal film like this. This is the epitome of an artistic movie. No subtlety, all make-believe and as unrealistic as it gets. I watched (many films from) a film series linked to vampires over the last few months and this is not officially one of them, but it would have fit the subject I guess. It also would have been by far the worst from all that I saw. No contest at all. No matter if it is one character repeatedly mentioning vampire zombies or making seemingly smart statements when another says that the vampire is dead for hundreds of years ("or he isn't") or if it is the group's mentality and the embarrassing slogan that they take every case or if it is the call they are getting in the end that implies there will be a new adventure and what the kid says that answers the call, this was all just ridiculously unwatchable. I wish I could say I enjoyed this at least as a guilty pleasure, like with the Twilight films for example, but I can't. It is all way too ridiculous, too absurd, too cringeworthy to watch and it is impossible to see any quality whatsoever in these over 1.5 hours. I highly recommend to stay far, far away from the outcome here. This is not a film you want to see and not a film you should want your kids to see. Major thumbs-down and this does not get me one bit more curious to take a look (or listen) into the huge body of work from the Three Question Marks.