Total RecalledÂ
Vortex (2001): 4 out of 10: If the producers of Overdrawn at the Memory Bank ever tried to remake Total Recall for German television it would look a lot like this movie.
Vortex is a short subtitled German film about an innocent man sentenced to a prison where he has to recreate his crime over and over again in the mode of Dante’s Inferno. Unfortunately, that short description is much more interesting than anything the film ever achieves.
The prison itself (outside of some horrible CGI spiders) is very well done and reminiscent of that large mutant town from the previously cited Total Recall. The film, however, does nothing with this new set up preferring to put its rather bland hero through a series of quite obvious moral dilemmas.
The film in retrospect makes little sense after the first twist ending and absolutely no sense after the second. It, however, does succeed in entertaining if only with dangling anticipation that something more appealing is going to happen very soon. Sadly for the viewer it never does.