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Invincible (DVD)
Year: 2001
Rating: M
Director: Werner Herzog
Cast: Jouko Ahola, Anna Gourari, Udo Kier, Tim Roth
Release Date: June 09, 2010
Distributor: Shock
The Film: 3.5
FILMINK rates DVDs and Blu-rays out of 5Despite some uneven acting and a rushed finale, this amazing story leaves an indelible mark.
Describing a Werner Herzog film as a curio is perhaps redundant, but if any deserve that moniker, it's this ersatz biopic about famed Jewish strongman Zishe Breitbart (played by Finnish World's Strongest Man competitor Jouko Ahola) and his foil, the charlatan clairvoyant who brought the occult to The Third Reich, Hanussen (a mincing, cruel Tim Roth). A veritable cornucopia of pan-Euro accents and uneven acting, Invincible takes some 133 rather slow minutes to tell its amazing story, dawdling in Breitbart's bucolic Jewish commune in Poland, and then again in introducing Hanussen's vaudevillian "Palace Of The Occult."
Casting his Nazis against type (with understated German faves Klaus Handl and Alexander Duda as Goebbels and Himmler), to say nothing of Roth's anti-heroic Hanussen, Herzog obfuscates the history (as is his wont, see: Rescue Dawn, Fitzcarraldo, and Aguirre, The Wrath of God) in order to bring to the forefront a dramatic sequence in which Breitbart reveals his Jewish heritage to a room full of stormtroopers. That sequence (in which the gigantic Jew removes his Aryan superman shock wig and stares down the SS) proves the essence of the film, as even a rushed finale fails to dilute its indelible mark.