How many 25-year-old, foreign-language movies do distributors figure stand a chance of doing good business in a theatrical rerelease? Short answer: Not a whole lot. But Run Lola Run is a thing unto itself: a love story, an action picture, a time-loop thriller. I saw it during its initial U.S. run in 1999, a few months after its 1998 German release, while I was a movies editor at TV Guide’s web startup. Everyone was talking about it and I had to see what the fuss was about. And the first 15 minutes made me a believer; it was vibrant and kinetic and unlike anything I’d ever seen. I was rooting for Lola from the start and on the hook till the very end.
Lola’s titular protagonist — played by flame-haired Franka Potente — is a firecracker, even if the bottom line is that her epic sprint through the streets of Berlin is a dizzying spin on an old trope: Stand by your man, whether he’s the cream of the crop or, well, “just a man.” It moves like a bullet train and it’s a crowd-pleaser: Who doesn’t want love to save the day... though more about that later.
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