Bimmer (2003)

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

All that we are seeing on the screen is happening with real people, real action sequences in the background, forcing the eye to watch as if we were there.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

The first and maybe best film from Buslov caught a zeitgeist, became a mega-hit and birthed one of the most popular ringtones in Russia. This is a classic fatalistic gangster movie about small-time Russian criminals from the nineties who accidentally kill an undercover cop and go into hiding on a stolen black BMW. This film caught the dusk of the nineties, of the gangster anarchy. The film's protagonists live by the rules of the nineties, but the rules, the world around them begin to change (part of the change is police and intelligence becoming the dominant "gangs"). The heroes are dinosaurs of the era that is ending but they are not conscious of it. The whole film can be viewed as a story of new world and new rules marginalizing and destroying the protagonists. The first half of the film is stronger then the second in my opinion, but all in all this film was made exceptional by unusually natural performances and authentic dialogue compared to other Russian crime movies.

Among the host of modern time Russian-made "gangster" movies (think Brat/Brother, Brigada, Antikiller, Zhmurki, etc.) this is by far the most realistic one.Brigada was very much a fiction movie, and so were both parts of Brother. Antikiller was middle of the road, and Zhmurki was just a parody on them all.One of the previous reviewers wrote that Bumer shows the life in today's Russia. This is not true. Bumer shows life as it was in the early to mid- 1990's (and that was, in fact, the film makers' stated intent).The "bratki" (gangsters), the "razborki" (inter-gang negotiations), the language, the extortions, the crooked cops, the truck drivers, the roads, the godforsaken village, the robbery - all are very realistic.The only downside of the film, to my taste, was a bit too many moralizing scenes. But I still rate it as 10 out of 10.

Debut movie from Piotr Buslov, yesterday's student and now acclaimed as "Russian Tarantino". The film is mystic criminal drama but also totally awesome portrait of modern Russia. Heroes is four men, a bunch of outlaws, try to escape from Moscow to a little out-of-the-way place. They kill one rude boy from another gang (actually he is an under cover cop) and want to hide from manhunt. They car, BMW 750 that they stole from foreign businessman have a bad karma and problems get started. This is the story of retribution and men's friendship with outstanding actor's plaing, great casting and original gangsters slang. Many Russian people does not understand some phrases of heroes at all. The director's cameo in the middle of the film is true genius: he is very decisive as racketeer's boss in scene on a gas station. Forget all another post-soviet Russian gangster-flicks, this is the one that you waiting for. As a parallel just imagine "Reservoir Dogs" meets "Easy Rider".

Bumer is frequently hailed as perhaps one of the best Russian movies in decades. This might be a capsule evaluation of dubious tendencies in the entire Russian cinema. Once this is the best ever, then which could have been the worst?Four young culprits of distinctively felonious appearance expropriate a luxury BMW car (of the title that stands for the slangy reference to this Bavarian vehicle, Russian version of Bimmer) and flee to nowhere with no particular aim in view.Sometimes it looks like Russia splits into two different never overlapping worlds. A regular person, not necessarily representing upper strata of society, from one ("normal") world may, luckily, never stumble across the harsh realities constantly experienced by the persons from the other ("warped") world.And somehow cinema (most of the contemporary Russian movies in particular) may reflect such explicit division.It might be either a glossy showcase of heroic typecast of characters or, otherwise a depiction of stereotypic brutal crooks (or minor variations) stewing in their own juice. The golden mean is regretfully rarely seen in our cinema nowadays.Some may say Bumer is unbelievably sincere and truthful, to the bones, in portrayal of horrors of our everyday life (or the wrong side of life).Violent robberies and rampant extortion elsewhere on the roads, corrupt law enforcement system, brutal shootouts and bloodshed between the gangs, lost generation - is this all real and does this exist? Undeniably - yes.Oh, did I forget terrible motorways impassable to that overpraised miracle of German engineering?But if the sole target of the producers of the film is the desire to persuade us that such horrible world with not a single positive hero in the vicinity really exists and, moreover, THIS IS OUR REALITY - well this isn't something that needs any more proofs. We've seen this all before and we are all well aware that life is full of crap.The direction is unexceptional and uneven at times. So is the yarn - an overlong and a kind of leisurely road trip with incidental clashes of our intrepid quartet against their colleagues in the other side of the law, or with angry truck drivers, or with militia. It has an overdose of flashbacks and ridiculous sprinkles of casual romantic liaisons.The dialog is mostly unconvincing and preposterous blend of rather tame foul language and pseudo-criminal folklore. Acting of the leads is decent at best, but I wonder who might be caring about the motives of the four half-witted laddies desperately floundering atop of the big bunch of muck they have devised for their own amusement: - just to keep themselves absorbed in shoveling their way through this mess to find the fate they actually deserve.And if anyone may, however, feel attracted to the trivial speculations on the issues of loyalty and betrayal (among that specific layer of the society) allegedly offered by the film - my humble opinion might easily be disregarded.