Power Trips

Das Experiment stars Moritz Bleibtreu (Run Lola Run) as Tarek, a disaffected journalist turned cabdriver who signs up as a guinea pig for a 14-day experiment in the dynamics of prison behavior. Tarek has heard that the project is being run by the military, and his instincts for the scoop are inflamed enough to send him back to his old editor, who outfits him with a special pair of video specs to document the fun. What follows is far-fetched and wearying, as 20 men are divvied up into guards and prisoners and set to it in a chrome-plated faux prison, while a staff of pinched-looking Teutonic scientists watches through a phalanx of surveillance cameras. The power structure emerges soon enough, and within the first two days, Berus, a nebbishy airport worker, goes from being the derided loser of the fake guards to their slicked-hair leader in brutal domination. Tarek, a prisoner and ever the rebel, becomes their primary target.

Director Oliver Hirschbiegel, making his feature debut after several years in German TV, and writers Mario Giordano, Christoph Darnstadt and Don Bohlinger, want to show us how quickly things can go wrong in an isolated setting, and how the us-against-them mentality can breed a blind acquiescence to following orders. But their film is too much of a mess to say anything with assurance, pieced together as it is from mismatched institutional movies such as Cool Hand Luke and Shock Corridor -- with Lord of the Flies thrown in for good measure -- and turning on plot points that simply don’t wash. (At one point, the two head scientists both take off, leaving the increasingly unstable project in the hands of a wide-eyed underling.) As the film dissipates into standard action-movie conventions, even the filmmakers seem to lose faith in the viability of their potentially provocative themes.

INVINCIBLE | Written and directed by WERNER HERZOG | Produced by GARY BART, HERZOG and CHRISTINE RUPPERT | Released by Fine Line Features | At Laemmle‘s Fairfax

DAS EXPERIMENT | Directed by OLIVER HIRSCHBIEGEL | Written by MARIO GIORDANO, CHRISTOPH DARNSTADT and DON BOHLINGER | Produced by NORBERT PREUSS, MARC CONRAD and FRITZ WILDFEUER | Released by Samuel Goldwyn Films | At the Nuart