The Great Movie Robbery

It’s a huge mess. At first, the script, which was bounded by somehow solid boundaries, turns into unimaginable anarchy about halfway through, full of performances by anyone with anyone and in any number of roles, which unfortunately does not quite manage to entertain. The individual (self-)parodic bits are good (the Hussites and Otakar Vávra, Miloš Kopecký as Dr Štrosmajer and surgeon Miroslav Macháček, the injured Marián Labuda being dragged on a stretcher by Lasica and Satinský because "he's theirs"), but together they don't work well. However, the connecting links of all this - the performances of Kaiser and Lábus and "Kaiser" and "Lábus" - were successful. Just like the mobsters. A great film heist is an unprecedented affair by the standards of Czech cinema. It's a strangely unsuccessful film, whose script was written by five people, although almost all of it looks like a hastily cobbled-together improvisation. Like many others, I am almost certain that the whole thing would have turned out differently if Oldřich Lipský had lived a few months longer and Zdeněk Podskalský had not taken the scepter. I round up two and a half stars for the final song with lyrics by Zdeněk Borovec. (18/09/2011)

A prime example of the unhinged and tedious nature of the variety show comedy of normalization. Plus the slimy Czech back-patting, ugh. Some might be surprised to learn that this is a precursor to the currently popular films based on pop culture references. (20/06/2022)