Storytelling as perpetual motion machine: With Crooks, Marvin Kren reunites the biggest names from 4 Blocks for a diverting hybrid of heist film and road movie. Speeding from Berlin to Vienna to Italy to Marseille, the eight-episode thriller offers so many cliffhangers and colorful character actors snarling at each other that the viewer never has time to ask whether it adds up to much.
A DREAM VACATION, BUT WITH VIOLENCE
Inspired by the real-life theft of a gold coin worth more than €3,000,000 from Berlin’s Bode Museum in 2017, Crooks kicks off with a similar smash-and-grab of an antique gold coin. The thieves are members of the Al-Walid ‘clan’ of Arab immigrants based in Kreuzkölln, as the intersection of Neukölln and Kreuzberg is now proudly known. Little do the Al-Walids know that a traitor in their midst has tipped off a Vienna crime syndicate as to where they’ve stashed the coin.The Viennese in turn enlist a crew of Albanians to do their dirty work in Berlin, namely blackmailing reformed safecracker and ex-con Charly Markovic (Frederick Lau) to break into the Al-Walids’ basement safe. The Viennese gangsters also order Joseph Muckstein (Christoph Krutzler), the black sheep among them, to drive to Berlin to pick up the coin.
All roads will lead to Marseille. Vienna blows up on Charly and Joseph, so they take flight, first to Italy, then France. It’s a road trip from hell, except all the settings are marvelously picturesque, and a wary bromance of sorts develops between Charly and Joseph. The Al-Walids and the Vienna gang are in hot pursuit, and waiting in Marseille are, on the lower end of the criminal scale, Algerian drug dealers in league with the Al-Walids, as well as, very much on the high end of criminality, “the Corsicans,” led by a grande dame named Griselda (Virginie Peignien).
LIKE A PREMIER LEAGUE TEAM OF BAD GUYS
A big part of the appeal of Crooks is the menagerie of criminal types scrambling for the precious coin. Post 4 Blocks, no German-language crime thriller is complete without a clan of immigrants from Southeastern Europe or the Middle East, at once cold-blooded and hot-headed, and given to much fierce glowering. Here we have the Al-Walids, with the old guard, Hassan (Erdal Yildiz), clinging to tribal notions of honor, and, almost inevitably, a corrupted younger generation, represented here by the cokehead Tarek (Nima Yaghobi, a.k.a. Nimo in his rap career).Crooks shows much more florid imagination with its Vienna gangsters, namely Red (the late Karl Welunschek), a brothel owner and would-be capo, a coarse, vile old man fond of exclaiming, “I decide who [has sex] in Vienna!” only he puts it much more crudely than that. The bane of his existence is his son, Rio (Lukas Watzl), a Goth fop whose incompetence at playing tough guy shows how the pitfalls of nepotism extend even to organized crime. Last and definitely least, there’s a trio of neo-Nazi hitmen, who, after a fearsome buildup, prove to be almost comically ineffectual, which might be a sly joke on the part of the showrunners.
So many different accents, so many bad dudes staring each other down; the cast is a veritable Schengen Area of tough guys. A couple of the more familiar faces bow out early, and violently, which keeps the viewer off guard, and clears some space for the bonding between Charly and Joseph. Ever-reliable, craggy-faced Everyman Frederick Lau shrewdly underplays as Charly, the better to surprise us as Charly’s criminal past comes to light. But the real find, and ballast, of Crooks is Christoph Krutzler as burly, sad-eyed Joseph. The much-mocked, unacknowledged bastard son of a dying crime boss, Joseph is stuck chauffeuring call girls when we first meet him. Eventually alcohol will unleash his inner Hulk, and the gold coin will awaken a Prince Hal side to his character.
GIB GAS, MANN!
The scripts here play as if Kren and his co-creators Benjamin Hessler and Georg Lippert challenged themselves to craft a narrative that was all cliffhangers. One minute Charly and Joseph are evading a strike force in the Austrian countryside, and barely half an hour of screen time later they’re fighting their way out of an Italian nightclub. This perpetual motion machine only starts to sputter when the story cuts to Samira and Jonas dodging bad guys in Marseille, a subplot that starts to feel conspicuously like padding. Like almost every streaming series nowadays, Crooks could stand to be an episode shorter. The real draw of Crooks is its travelogue-with-shootouts structure. In the first couple of episodes, the clean, empty boulevards of Vienna are a contrast to the gritty, crowded Berlin districts of Wedding and Kreuzkölln. Later there are glorious shots of Charly and Joseph speeding down the Italian coast, with festive middle-of-the-road Europop on the car stereo amping up the road trip vibe.Best of all, when the show settles into Marseille, it appears as if the Austrian showrunners understandably became entranced by the Mediterranean light. Sprinkled throughout the last few episodes are shots of almost startling offhand beauty, as when characters stand on a terrace overlooking the city during magic hour, or when the Algerian dealers strut around on top of their improbably picturesque hillside banlieue amid the embers of daylight. As much as the twists and turns of the plot, these moments are all the incentive one needs to keep watching.
“Crooks”
Eight episodes, approx. 45–60 min. each.
Starring: Frederick Lau, Christoph Krutzler, Svenja Jung, Jonathan Tittel, Erdal Yildiz, Kida Khoda Ramadan
Creators: Marvin Kren, Benjamin Hessler, Georg Lippert
Directors: Marvin Kren, Cüneyt Kaya
Production Company: W&B Television GmbH, 357 Films