Few filmmakers have successfully made a good political thriller in the modern age with the advent of a constantly updating pool of technology. Problems can be easily solved, created, reduced, or obscured using methods that involve certain brand names that will probably be irrelevant shortly afterwards.This film shows how clunky it can be with idiotic claims and techniques that even the most basically technically capable person can see through. This is only a small part of what's wrong with director Christoph Hochhausler's The Lies of the Victors, a film that comes with good intentions but it's just too clumsy with its parts in order to work. The convenience of a political thriller is that you can paint a picture of corruption while showing as little as possible. Most of the on screen action can be confined to talking or snooping, uncovering only small details. It's often a restrained and intelligent portion of the genre. Unfortunately, for The Lies of the Victors neither story is particularly interesting nor convincing.Two journalists, one a diabetic gambling womanizer (Florian David Fitz) and the other a plucky intern (Lillith Stangenberg), find themselves working together as her story of a man who committed suicide by jumping in a lion pit is connected to his investigation into army veterans who are forced into industrial waste jobs. The cast is generally solid, but the writing hardly gives them an opportunity to shine. Given such little information and development with the characters, it's difficult to invest or root for them. A lot of it feels like pseudo-science, but I don't know enough to dispute. Can toxic waste lead you to delusions that you can talk to big cats? I doubt it. The film takes itself too seriously to not find yourself bugged by it for the rest of the film.To its credit, it makes great use of fluid photography, gliding around characters in a cinematic way, even if their choices of wide angle lenses warp the edges of the frame a little too much. To its discredit, I haven't seen editing as bad as this in a long time. They are not Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter. You cannot go at this frenetic pace and hope to come out with a coherent outcome. There is no sense of rhythm and it completely loses you right away. The film is chewed up, spat out, and looks like a poor music video. It often cuts out the boring parts such as a character walking from one side of the room to another. Maybe they're just trying to cut down the runtime, but it wasn't worth the effort. Self-indulgent flourishes like using a clip of Humphrey Bogart to illustrate Hochhausler's message about the press for him doesn't help the film's case.This is a downbeat film complete with a bleak point about media manipulation and cynicism with political lobbyists. It's one that does quite resonate in certain ways if not chill to the bone like the film wants to while its execution leaves you cold instead. A true story may have been a better choice than making stuff up like this. 5/10
