Released: 17th April 2020 (Netflix)
Length: 94 Minutes
Certificate: 15
Director: Cüneyt Kaya
Starring: David Kross, Emily Goss and Frederick Lau
Offering an engrossing story that’s filled with rising tension, the business crime genre has had many an entry from The Wolf of Wall Street to The Big Short. Rising High, a smaller effort from Germany, offers competence, but fails to set itself apart from its contemporaries.
Rising High follows Viktor (Daniel Kross), a young entrepreneur with a penchant for outfoxing laws and regulations of society; leaving home to make a living for himself, he ends up finding a loophole in Berlin’s property market. With his trusty partner Gerry (Frederik Lau) in tow, Viktor and his associates bid up all the housing they can to form a monopoly and make themselves rich in the process. Along the way he falls for local accountant Nicole (Emily Goss) and starts to construct a lavish lifestyle. Mostly playing out through negotiations and character discussions, Viktor’s rise and fall is charted over its ninety-four minute run-time. At first, Rising High appears to offer a different take on the get-rich-quick narrative, using the character’s sly entrance into property buying as a base to fuel the narrative. Viktor is ambitious, calculating, driving the first act of the story well enough. What follows afterwards however is a rather generic formula that you can easily predict. Without following through on its main market sector, it all gets rather samey after a while, with the same slowly edited party sequences and financial dealings playing back in a way we’ve all seen before. There is some tension that builds up between and his business partners, but it rarely reaches an investing peak. The final act hints at what Rising High could have been; had Viktor been torn between his obsession with business and loyalty to his friends and family, the film could have gone deeper. As it stands, the production merely settles for standard territory.
While the characters in Rising High are given some strong performances, the film’s script rarely allows them to expand on their initial archetypes. Viktor is the main perspective throughout the film and this was definitely the right choice. His character is certainly well-established, learning the tricks of swindling from his father and boasting a seemingly charming exterior that gets his foot through the door; but he goes through the same beats of every expert con artist. Victor lives it large, sees the cracks start to appear and eventually loses all of it. While David Kross does a good job of showing this slow breakdown, there’s nothing to set his performance apart from the countless other characters that have populated the genre. Gerry is the opposite to Viktor; more rugged in his approach and constantly hanging out with stiff drinks and his troupe of strippers. His large ego is consistently on display throughout the party scenes. Sadly, the film doesn’t play the two off each other in many unique ways. It would have been interesting to see their varying approaches clash. Finally, there’s Nicole; generally, well played by Emily Goss, the pressure starts to mount on her in particular which is conveyed well in the latter half of the film. In fact, three actors come into their own in the second act when it comes to emotion and stress; they’re not given any chance to rise above that.
None of what happens in Rising High is badly thought out or poorly produced; only aggressively forgettable. The film doesn’t do anything with the rag-to-riches crime genre that hasn’t been done many times before. Aside from the reasonable performances on display, it’s not a worthwhile watch.
Rating: 2.5/5 Stars (Mediocre)