Web posted on: Thursday, July 01, 1999 11:23:05 AM EDT

By Reviewer Paul Tatara

You've probably heard of art. It's a way humans can communicate ideas normally difficult to express. Tellingly, they communicate these ideas to other humans.

Films, when people invest the emotional energy required to complete the artist-audience transaction, are capable of jarring us into self-examination. Or at the very least, they can encourage us to wonder why we persist in getting so hopelessly lost while trying our hardest to make some sense out of life.

A director can say something worthwhile to an audience by having his characters laugh or cry or dance or throw people off glistening high-rises, if that's what he's into. He or she just has to make sure we care about the characters. "Post human" movies aren't about to generate that kind of response. And "Run Lola Run" is post human enough to be a big hit.

There are many journeys taken in "Run Lola Run," several of which play themselves out three or four times and come to three or four different conclusions.

Franka Potente plays Lola, a punkish young German woman with bright orange hair. Lola's boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu) calls her up on the phone as the film opens. He's lost a bag of money he was supposed to deliver to a vicious drug lord, and now he needs Lola to come up with 100,000 deutsche marks in the next 20 minutes, or he'll be killed. If she doesn't get to the phone booth before the time is up, he'll take his handgun to a nearby supermarket and try to steal the cash.

The electronic score (which sounds like a cross between The Chemical Brothers and a Nintendo kick-boxing sonata) leaps into high gear -- WHUMP-THUMPA-WHUMP-THUMPA-BLEEEEET -- and Lola sets off running.

Lola runs and runs and runs. And runs some more. She's heading to the office of her father, an evidently rich businessman who may or may not have a difficult past with his daughter. It's really hard to say because the moments of supposed high emotion are just tossed into the action like paprika sprinkled over a personal computer. Lola's journey consists of dodging and running over various obstacles, some of which are inanimate objects and some of which are people. They all, however, add up to the same thing in the (very) long run.

Twyker kicks the high gear into even higher gear by taking little detours into the lives of the people Lola is ignoring. Each time she bumps into someone, we see a little five-second photo essay on what happens to that person from that day forward (a woman gets her baby taken from her; a man and a woman fall in love and have an S&M relationship, etc.) Then we zip back to Lola tearing across Europe. WHUMP-THUMPA-WHUMP-THUMPA-BLEEEEET.

A T.S. Eliot quote that appears before the credits is supposed to imply that there's more here than meets the eye, but all the film ultimately says is that Lola doesn't have any idea what's coming next. This is a scoop.

The rest is (quite intentionally) an elaborate video game disguised as a motion picture. It's not ruining anything to tell you that, once Lola gets shot and dies, everything starts over at the beginning. She gets the call, drops the phone and takes off running. Each time, however, there are variations in the action, and the five-second biographies of the human flotsam on the streets are completely different. Then it starts all over again. WHUMP-THUMPA-WHUMP-THUMPA-BLEEEEET.

There's no reason to wonder how Lola will respond to the next jet-powered diversion. And, most importantly (in light of the self-imposed laziness under which modern audiences usually operate), there's no reason to care what she does next. She just does it; anticipating how "cool" it'll look when it happens is the only reason to watch.

It's not that Twyker fails at what he's trying to do. There's always tons of unmotivated flash to keep the viewer rattled, and the revved-up pacing doesn't give you time to wonder what the point is. It works like gangbusters, but so would someone repeatedly shooting a pistol over your head. The visual assault contains enough jarring quick-cuts to hold together a weekend of Lenny Kravitz videos. Forget about applause; Twyker is looking for hyperventilation and pants-wetting.

It's Ms. Pac-Man meets Quentin Tarantino. I'll eat my dog if there isn't a Hollywood remake on our screens in the next 18 months.

"Run Lola Run" is bound to be a hit with the fashion-disco crowd, in which interpersonal connections are fostered by shouting above a mechanical din while wearing the "right" clothes. Contains violence and profanity, but it's all rather cartoonish; there are even some animated sequences of Lola running. Rated R. 81 minutes, which says a lot about the content. In German with English subtitles ... when people have to talk.