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So much average

Good concept, poorly executed.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

The directorial debut of Schwentke is no-doubt a very well shot movie. It looks beautiful, ıts atmosphere is intriguing, the score and soundtrack is perfect match and the acting is above average.. whoever succeeds in shooting a movie that looks like this as a debut is deemed to be a very successful director. thats for sure.. His obssesion with reflections can be tiring from time to time but Schwentke handles this so delicately this trademark of his never feels repetitive..It is nearly impossible to think of someone who would not wonder about Schwentke's next project after watching Tattoo. So after so much praise lets come to the negatives. I will say only one thing: story.. It is full of nonsense. Minks a cop of years of experience on the streets can not locate his own daughter but the younger cop who is asked to help find her in a day.. and hey she was working as a bartender in a nightclub. But a 20 year veteran detective who seems to live to find his daughter can not locate her..? Actually I myself had difficulty in following the plot but the movie gives you the understanding that the police in Germany is really really incompetent--no offense to the Polizie it is just what the movie suggests..-- 12 deads, one dead detective and his daughter and still no one seems to care including the chief..? I think with a stronger screenplay this movie had the potential to be a classic especially with the direction of Schwentke.. A solid 7.5

A young and inexperienced cop in Berlin sheds his innocence when he is drawn into a series of bloody murders commissioned by a mysterious tattoo fetishist. While a rather untypical product of mainstream European cinema, this first major effort by director Robert Schwentke is nonetheless a good indicator of where young German filmmakers are heading to. It would seem that most of the local filmschool hipsters have been molded by the same standard principles in story and production design that make for occasional good but, alas, also a majority of awful Hollywood flicks. This propensity may be best observed in the seminal TV crime series Tatort (Scene of the Crime), where aspiring cinematographers get a chance to work hands on – Schwentke, for his part, directed three episodes. Though the "cinematic" feel and level of "professionality" of these 90-minute small screen pictures have certainly gone up in the past ten or so years, you have to be alarmed at how interchangeable and, arguably, dull they have become. Tattoo is an ambitious Tatort. It is in a way very mature – scarily so. It's all neatly timed, the story and plot are textbook, the locations well-casted (most likely the only film set in Berlin that does without the usual tourist vistas), the travellings elaborate, the picture is crafty, the soundtrack heavily suggestive etc. But, as the French say, the mayonnaise doesn't blend. In fact, the director's intentions (making a gritty Euro urban thriller) are as subtle as ripping someone's skin off to get his tattoo. (By the way, the idea is by no means new – the 1968 French comedy Le Tatoué with Jean Gabin and Louis de Funès treated this subject in a far more refined way.) Unlike his famous US predecessors, Tattoo never hits the right tone and, worst of all, lacks genuinely creepy moments and an overall tension. "They say a person's house is a mirror to his soul..." See, that's the sort of dialogue, along with some fluffy art talk about 17th-century Japanese tattoo masters, that'll strangle any movie to a pathological death. This general impression extends to the actors who desperately try to come to terms with their storyboard characters. Germany's shooting star August Diehl as an unlikely specimen of a new generation of techno-dancing big city cops delivers a wholly unconvincing performance. Christian Redl is your cynical old school detective with a chip on his shoulder, and lacks depth. Nadeshda Brennicke does her best to play a Kraut version of the femme fatale, which is obviously far from enough. (Well, she is half redeemed once she's dropped her skirt.) And while all this is still more or less acceptable for a late Saturday night telly flick, the end clearly isn't. What happened there? Where was the teacher to get Schwentke to revise his homework? But apart from that glitch, let there be no doubt that this German model pupil is off for a great Hollywood career shooting commissioned box office busters by the dozen. Good riddance, if you ask me.

Saw this flick at a funky theater in Pasadena, California known for showing art-type films.I thought this film was very well made. OK, the ending was slightly ambiguous, but who cares. The story, character development, acting were great and the production value was high. It was beautifully shot, lit, directed, edited and the music was great. Was hoping to get to see it again but it left the theatre before I had a chance. I am a big fan of this genre and most are not of the level of quality of TATTOO.Am I the only person who liked this movie this much? And I don't even have a tattoo.Anybody know if this film can be rented or purchased?roz tillman

Well, I generally don't have a very high opinion about German movies. This movie I just saw because it happened to be the Sneak Preview movie of the week.I was not totally disappointed. The movie tells an interesting serial murder mystery and succeeds in thrilling the viewer with a lot of well done cinematographic tricks. But let's be honest: Se7en certainly comes to mind every minute during the whole movie.What do we have here? We have a young detective at the murder department, August Diehl is the German version of Brad Pitt. He certainly does a good job there.Then we have the grumpy old Morgan Freeman character, Pitts, pardon, Diehls partner.We have the setting: An ugly collection of dark and gritty rooms, followed by ugly suburbian areas followed by rainy night scenes followed be ugly dark rooms again. Message to all foreigners: It's NOT raining all the time in Germany - but of course it's raining all the time in Se7en too :-)Further Se7en elements: The serial murder plot, the special delivery to one of the detectives, the (not too) surprising solution and the huge amount of blood and gore.Oh, but we have no Gwyneth Paltrow here and instead of the seven mortal sins the focus of the story is on splendid tattoos.