TL;DR – While the narrative needed some strength, we got a quality action film with some stand-out brawls.

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene.

Disclosure – I paid for the Netflix service that viewed this film.

Sixty Minutes Review –

It is Action Friday because after finishing off the final episode of Reacher’s second season, it is time to take a trip to Berlin to check out a German action film. While we have seen a lot of action films, I realised that I have never seen one out of Germany before. Well, today is the day I will fix that.

So to set the scene, Octavio Bergmann (Emilio Sakraya) is an MMA fighter who is stuck in a dilemma. He is facing the biggest and most prosperous fight in his life. But it is also his daughter Leonie’s (Morîk Maya Heydo) birthday, and the fighter Benko (Aristo Luis) is late, very late. He is stuck between a rock and a hard. But when his ex and mother of Leonie, Mina (Livia Matthes), gives him an ultimatum: see his daughter by 6 pm (one hour away) or be cut out of her life, well, that decision becomes clear for Octavio. Just maybe not for all the shady people who put bets on the fight. Oh, and it is rush hour in Berlin.

The best thing that the film did was cast Emilio Sakraya in the lead. He has the physicality that you desperately need in a movie like this. You have to believe that he can go for sixty minutes non-stop, and you kind of do. Also, that he is a genuinely nice person who has been pushed into a world he does not want to be in. Speaking of the action, I liked that it knew when to hold the action and when it needed to cut. Of the action scenes, I think my favourite was the nightclub. What a nightclub was doing in a train station, I don’t know, but it works. Respect to Tolga Degirmen and their team because those were some hard hits, and padding can only do so much.

As someone who does not have a great sense of the geography of Berlin, I am grateful that they added a map in so you could follow the action. Then there is the helpful countdown clock that doesn’t quite have the punch of 24, but it still works. One way the film integrates its narrative is through the use of a phone that is connected to his EarPods by his watch. It is probably one of the better implementations of this kind of technology that I have seen. However, the biggest fantasy in this entire film is that those EarPods did not get knocked out at some point. It all helps with the flow of the film, which you need when there is a time crunch happening.  

However, as the film went on, you did start to see some cracks forming here and there. The push to get towards the end does take a few shortcuts here and there, with people popping up in places they probably should not have been able to get to. Also, while the action is excellent, you do start to feel that the narrative is a thin veneer used to hold the different scenes in place. Some depth was needed to flesh this world out, and while I appreciate the tight 90-minute runtime, an extra five or ten minutes building the foundations of this world stronger would have helped.     

In the end, do we recommend Sixty Minutes? If you like action films, I would say that this is one you should check out. It was interesting seeing MMA techniques used outside of the ring especially in such tight action scenes like this. If you liked Sixty Minutes, we would recommend to you Bring Him to Me.

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

Have you watched Sixty Minutes?, let us know what you thought in the comments below, feel free to share this review on any of the social medias and you can follow us Here. Check out all our past reviews and articles Here, and have a happy day. 

Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of Sixty Minutes
Directed by – Oliver Kienle
Written by – Philip Koch & Oliver Kienle
Music by – Michael Kadelbach
Cinematography by – Markus Nestroy
Edited by – Knut Hake & Maria Gans
Production/Distribution Companies – Nocturna Productions, W&B Television & Netflix
Starring – Emilio Sakraya, Dennis Mojen, Marie Mouroum, Paul Wollin, Florian Schmidtke, Aristo Luis, José Barros Moncada, Vassilis Koukalani, Janna Striebeck, Morîk Maya Heydo, Livia Matthes, Mahmet Ateşҫi, Enikö Fülöp, Bruce Willow, Tatjana Šojić, Alain Blažević & Georg Blumreiter
Rating – Australia: MA15+;