Additionally, many stories were recycled over the years, but this is nothing to be surprised about in today's movies and television shows. However, one should not expect realistic and unpredictable plots. Overall, Cobra 11 is a relatively entertaining show that often features some great stunts and car action. Meanwhile, it would be too optimistic to expect any meaningful continuity anyway, with the show going on for twenty years and some actors having played up to four or five different villains. I still laugh out loud every time I see the two heroes' BMW being suddenly replaced by its predecessor model - equipped with plastic stickers in the producers' futile attempt to conceal the obvious switch - right before being totaled in a spectacular crash or while being shot at by the bad guys. In the show's early days, these mistakes were so common and obvious that they significantly contributed to its comedic value, especially in the absence of any meaningful story. Continuity mistakes are equally omnipresent. However, there are also some surprising villains and situations, such as the tenants of a retirement home who smuggle drugs or two preteen boys stealing a dump truck and taking it for a joyride on the Autobahn, unsurprisingly causing a pile-up.
#Alarm for cobra 11 movie drivers#
The villains are often members of Eastern European, Italian or South American organized crime, truck drivers pick up prostitutes and/or engage in illegal activities to get a raise from a murky boss, lawyers and prosecutors are egoistic and arrogant, bored men sift through Playboy magazines, teenagers are drugged-up as they fool around and make chaos. New cars, pastimes and gadgets are often prominently featured and some episodes look like a mash-up of elements from a number of popular Hollywood films like Speed, Bruce Willis' action flicks, Lethal Weapon or The Fast and the Furious series. The show follows the trends set by Hollywood movies, technological progress, consumerism and globalization, relying heavily on them. And these are just two of meanwhile a couple of hundred examples. If they are discussing new technologies, someone will use a revolutionary weapon to sabotage a car driving on the Autobahn. If the two heroes are discussing organically produced food, a tanker truck filled with organically produced milk will crash in front of them and they will discover crime related to the company owning it. Coincidences are so unbelievable that they can only occur in one's dreams as far as reality is concerned. Basically every episode begins with an enormous pile-up on the Autobahn and ends with the two heroes chasing the main villain into his or her destruction, which usually comes in the form of a spectacular crash and/or a massive explosion. But during this weekly action overkill, nobody really cares about a BMW 3 changing into a BMW 2 during a salto mortale, so sit back and relax with the autobahn cops meeting the most unusual horrors on the German highways to hell.Ĭobra 11 is undoubtedly one of the most predictable television shows ever produced. There are also too many goofs in it, with cars changing it's model and design within seconds or with unreal facts like times and distances. At it's worst, it's just a repetition of the same flying BMW cars exploding somewhere on the highways.
#Alarm for cobra 11 movie tv#
At its best, "Cobra 11" is thrilling and sometimes even outstanding German TV action entertainment. There is a femme fatale, killing Ferrari drivers as she was a rape victim years before, and there is a gang of bank robbers sieging the cops in a lonely forest house just like John Wayne in "Rio Bravo". There is a handicapped "Phantom of the Opera" living in an empty garage besides a lonely highway, running amok on the the autobahn with guns and bombs.
There are ninja killers murdering innocent victims on highway bridges.
#Alarm for cobra 11 movie movie#
The best about this series are the two main actors, the often funny dialogues (often inspired by Mel Gibson and Danny Glover) and the usually thrilling and sometimes weird plots with plenty of references to well-known movie genres. It's all very influenced by modern Hollywood action cinema or Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay and sometimes appears like a prime time TV version of "Speed", "Con Air", "Die Hard" and the "Lethal Weapon" series. These cops usually meet all the evil men somewhere on the German autobahns which leads to spectacular car chases with big crashes and explosions and people dying at least two or three times during each 45-minute episode. It shows the cases of two highway patrol officers, played by Turkish actor Erdogan Atalay (probably because many young Turks are into high-speed BMW and Mercedes sedans) and his handsome buddy Rene Steinke, his third companion in this series. "Alarm fur Cobra 11" (Emergency for Cobra-11) is a popular German TV cop series that is running on the TV station RTL since 1996 with great success.