“The devil’s staying power”: In their 40th case, Boerne and Thiel meet as always and yet new. It also shows that there are other people in the world.
Twenty years of giggling about Boerne and Thiel, an audience has long been growing that no longer knows the world without the two clowns from Münster. Everyone is peacefully getting older together, the younger ones, the older ones, bitch around a bit, then switch on again anyway. “It’s possible with a little less slapstick,” said Thiel years ago (2016) in the episode “One foot rarely comes alone”, but of course that doesn’t work.
It’s not up to Thiel either, the serious, demure fan of a football team that has fallen out of sight south of the Benrather line, whereas Boerne just can’t keep his mouth shut. Those who can’t shut up are probably the more sensitive, and Boerne also babbles on about death in his best moments. At his worst moments he is unbearable.
Axel Prahl and Jan Josef Liefers: In other films and in life out here, they keep reminding their audience that they are still here. But in Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, too, people primarily and most liked to see the strange couple. Yes, it’s supposed to go on like this forever, that’s actually the whole point with such connections.
Real danger looms in the 40th edition of the Münster crime scene, written by the experienced Münster crime scene author Thorsten Wettcke, staged from lovingly arranged perspectives by Francis Meletzky, who, like Wettcke, was already involved in episode 20. Like Boerne, they both know (Thiel knows anyway) where the fun ends, because even in the Münster crime scene there is such a point. The flickering between the bad event and the lame joke is not always captured as meaningfully as this time.
“The Devil’s Long Breath” doesn’t gain its impetus so much from the extensive criminal plot, but from the fact that Boerne and Thiel meet sensible people, people like you and me, who can only wonder.
In a way, it’s a Sherlock Holmes plot. It can’t be what it clearly looks like, so it has to be different and the people involved have to think, look around and dig up knowledge until light sheds light on it. What Sherlock Holmes can do alone, Thiel and Boerne can only do if a number of others help them. At the center of this father-child crime scene is old Thiel, Claus D. Clausnitzer. He can fall back on his special skills, which, by the way, already played a role in “One Foot Rarely Comes Alone”. Frau Klemm, Mechthild Großmann, involves him at the right moment, her sobriety is a joy.
Ms. Haller, ChrisTine Ursprechen, meanwhile, soon goes her own way, where she meets another normal person, a coroner, Judith Goldberg, with whom she works well. The two make their own jokes, which are no funnier than Boerne’s. But there should be agreement that Boerne deserves exactly that: bad jokes at his expense.
Another person from the normal world is detective Kröger, Banafshe Hourmazdi, as reason personified. She gets along well with Thiel afterwards, two North Germans on a rapprochement course.
“The Devil’s Long Breath”, a title that already reveals everything, so to speak, always follows the usual path in a charming way. Although everything suggests that Thiel committed a crime in an exceptional situation, but nobody believes it. This reduces wasted time and increases investigative zeal on all sides. You might understand part of the story a little too quickly, but not the whole.
In addition, of course, routine jokes, a criminalistic important koala bear, a criminalistic important wild boar. Or Boerne and Haller in a joint burglary, which is not very interesting, but gives Boerne the opportunity for a nice mnemonic. “If you commit a burglary, you must first put your phone on silent.”
Another advantage is that “The Devil’s Long Breath” picks up on Boerne’s taste in music. And in a moment of collective emotion, something else changes. whoops But the audience doesn’t have to fidget for long, the next Münster crime scene has already been announced for March 6th.
“Crime scene: The devil’s long breath”, ARD, Sunday, 8:15 p.m.
