Anatomy 2 Movie Review

When young medical student Jo Hauser (Barnaby Metschurat) leaves his small town and his crippled brother for an internship at a Berlin hospital, he quickly becomes aware of Professor Muller-LaRousse (Herbert Knaup), who holds sway as a famous neurosurgeon revered by a group of doctors chosen to be part of his secret clan. Its purpose is to assist his revolutionary development of computer-controlled muscle replacement and is based on disavowing the Hippocratic Oath as an undesirable obstruction to advanced science, like his project to build body parts for a master race.

Hauser is eventually invited to join and, after accepting all legal responsibility for anything that may come of it, embraces the rare privilege of being one of the insiders and an experimental guinea pig. Sexy doctor Viktoria (Heike Makatsch) takes the innocent intern under her wing and inside her panties for a chemically enhanced morale boost in the lab. It's her job to keep him loyal and beyond the reach of nurse Lee (beautiful Filipina Rosie Alvarez), a stable, sensitive type who has fallen for the finer attributes of the young intern. Lee remains his island of sensibility even when she discovers that her boy has volunteered to have synthetic muscles implanted in his legs in order to beat everyone on the soccer field. It's not too long before unrestrained experimentation turns diabolical and homicidal, as does any reason to take any of it seriously.

The thing that kept me in my seat far longer than I had an inclination to remain was the promise that brought me into the theatre in the first place: Franka Potente (Run Lola Run, The Bourne Identity). While she was the central figure of the original Anatomy, her role in this story is so hopelessly irrelevant, you can call it casting fraud. Her first appearance as policewoman Paula Hennig cartoonishly tracking down the renegade doctors comes so late in the piece that I thought I read the credits wrong, was in the wrong theatre, or had tripped into an alternate universe. Obviously, she's here solely for an infusion of marquee value and I got gypped.

Writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky's well lubricated movie madness is an overstimulated slasher-thriller in green scrubs, with Dr. Mengele hovering in the background. It purports to be a sequel to his more successful horror film at medical school, but this quest for power through bio-mechanics and chemistry suffers from a banality drip and an over-rich diet of comic books. The prognosis is not good.

Aka Anatomie 2.

When the doctors all wear red, that's your signal not to go there.