Karim Abdullah, known as Keko, wanted to be a bank robber as a child. Now the serious criminal from Berlin has robbed a bank with five friends and pathetically asserts: He would rather die than go to prison again. Keko is played by “4 Blocks” star Kida Khodr Ramadan, who also acts as co-author and co-director in “Testo” – and who will soon be serving a prison sentence in real life. If that’s no street credibility is! ARD praises his new miniseries as an “experimental format” with a “creative and innovative directing concept”.
What is special about “Testo” is the speed with which the project was implemented. After the success of Ramadan’s prison series “Asbestos”, which was a hit in the ARD media library, he and his co-director Olivia Retzer were able to start filming after just a few weeks. The montage is also intended to create speed and dynamism, not forcing the event into a two-hour film, but rather breaking it down into seven episodes between 15 and 20 minutes long – which is intended to attract younger audiences to the Internet.
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The episodes have titles like “Chaos,” “Adrenaline,” and “Escalation” – which is basically a running description. The bank robbery escalates into chaos when Keko and Co. discover a vault in the bank and decide to clear out all the lockers instead of rushing in immediately. The expected scene builds up: inside the gangsters and hostages, outside the police and SEK.
The cast, which ARD calls “sensational,” includes familiar Ramadan players. His friend Frederick Lau is there again, playing the gangster “Stulle” in a football jersey with an 80s mullet. Stipe Erceg as the safe cracker “Pepsi” and rapper Veysel Celin as the pit bull “Barro” were also seen in “Asbestos”.
With Nicolette Krebitz, Kathrin Angerer, Katharina Thalbach, Ronald Zehrfeld and Uwe Preuss, the hostages and police officers are actually well cast, even if some of them only have quirky short appearances, like Katharina Thalbach as the police chief. But the creators’ sympathy clearly belongs to the gangsters. The audience should celebrate the boys because they have such an honest drive, explains Kida Khodr Ramadan in an ARD interview.
Lots of testosterone and a limited vocabulary
But that’s difficult (and not just because people don’t think murdering hostages is all that cool). Because Frederick Lau, Stipe Erceg and Veysel Celin play their characters in such an over-the-top manner that they quickly become annoying. Their vocabulary consists of the building blocks “son of a bitch!”, “bastard!”, “wanker!” and “fuck you!” – that’s also tiring. Above all, however, the production does not find a coherent concept. Playing with elements like the grainy images from the surveillance cameras is not profitable. The story goes around in circles for a long time and provides two inappropriate resolutions.