The Premise
A German Netflix comedy from writer-director Marco Petry (co-written with Janina Petry), landing on the platform in August 2026. Kostja Ullmann plays Olli, a man whose entire life plan is being roommates with his best friend Matze (David Kross) and taking a big round-the-world trip together, the way they've been promising since they were kids. Then Matze meets Rebecca (Janina Uhse), falls hard, and suddenly the two-man unit has a third person on the couch. Early scenes set up the shared apartment, the trip countdown, and Olli deciding — the second Rebecca's toothbrush appears — that she's the problem to be solved.
The Case For
Ullmann and Kross have real chemistry as childhood friends, and the first fifteen minutes of watching them do their bit together has a lived-in shorthand you can't fake. Janina Uhse gives Rebecca more spine than the script deserves. Petry has done this kind of glossy German mid-budget comedy before, and it looks fine. If you want a movie playing in the background while you fold laundry and don't want to read subtitles about anything heavy, it exists. That's the case.
The Case Against
The premise is a jealous adult man trying to sabotage his best friend's relationship for ninety minutes, and the movie never figures out whether to find that funny, sad, or romantic. So it tries all three and lands none. The pranks-and-schemes stretch plays at a sitcom pitch the writing can't sustain. The "he's actually a lost boy who needs to grow up" pivot arrives with no earned turn under it. Dialogue explains feelings that better performances were already showing. Reviewers on Letterboxd, Metacritic and What's on Netflix have used the words "mean-spirited," "joyless," "insufferable" and "juvenile," and they're not wrong. There's nobody to root for and no joke big enough to make that not matter.
Who It's For, Who'll Bounce
If you loved I Love You, Man and thought the bromance genre needed a version where the friend is openly awful and there's no Paul Rudd to soften it, maybe. If you have specific affection for German Netflix comedies (Isi & Ossi, Buba) and want to keep up, sure. Anyone hoping for a rom-com in the actual romance sense will quit around the twenty-minute mark, because the romance is a bystander getting sabotaged. Anyone allergic to sustained secondhand embarrassment: bounce immediately. Fans of Peter Pan syndrome movies where the character eventually learns something will find the "learning" here arrives by fiat, not by story.
The Ruling
WAR CRIME lands because of a specific craft failure, not because the movie's mean. Movies can be mean and great. This one builds its whole engine on a protagonist actively wrecking a relationship, then loses the nerve to commit to him as a comic villain or a tragic figure, so he just reads as unpleasant for eighty minutes and redeemed in ten. The pacing sits at one note. The writing keeps stating what the actors are already doing. Petry stages the pranks like a broader comedy and the feelings like a quieter drama and the two tones cancel each other out — you're not laughing, you're not moved, you're just watching people be small at each other. No lecture problem here; the sin is pure execution. The 4/10 from 14 voters isn't a jury bias, it's a signal. Skip it.