Ben Affleck on the run with no memory: TV tips for those who don’t like football
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Don’t feel like watching football in the evening? We recommend three worthwhile alternative programs for those who don’t like the World Cup. This time with Ben Affleck, who fights against a supercomputer with Uma Thurman, and with Aljoscha Stadelmann, who is investigating in the Harz Mountains for the sixth time.
The 2026 World Cup from the USA, Mexico and Canada is gradually entering the home stretch. France and Spain will meet in the first semi-final on Tuesday, July 14th. Kick-off is at 9 p.m. ZDF reports from 8:15 p.m. If you don’t care, you’ll find exciting alternatives this evening – even on linear TV. We present three films.
“Paycheck – The Billing” (Kabel Eins, 8:15 p.m.)
The story of “Paycheck – The Reckoning” is based on a template by the cult author Philip K. Dick and is accordingly quite tough: The focus of John Woo’s thriller, which Kabel Eins repeats at 8:15 p.m., is the highly qualified engineer Jennings (Ben Affleck), who carries out special orders for large companies and often reinvents the wheel. However, he cannot boast about his developments: on the one hand, everything is top secret, and on the other hand, his short-term memory is erased after the work is done to ensure that he cannot then pass on his works to the competition.
Jennings’ current contract lasted three years, at the end of which he should have collected $92 million. But there wouldn’t be a film if something didn’t go wrong. Jennings finds out that he had given away the rights to his securities worth millions before the memory was erased – unbelievable for the money-hungry yuppie. But over time it becomes clear that they want to kill him, and in every murder attempt he is helped by an accessory from a mysterious envelope that he supposedly sent to himself.
With the will of a seemingly betrayed man and the strength of two hearts – the love for his girlfriend (Uma Thurman) apparently continues even without memory – he fights back to destroy the invention of the memoryless man, which now threatens the world: a supercomputer that can predict the future.
“Hard Brocken: The Arms Deal” (ARD, 8:15 p.m.)
The ARD series “Harzer Brocken” has been involved in the “humorous crime thrillers” segment since 2015 – and has earned a lot of good reviews since then. There are now nine films and two more are said to have been shot. With “Hard Brocken: The Arms Deal,” Das Erste is now repeating the sixth film in the loose story from May 2021 at 8:15 p.m. One could easily underestimate the village policeman Frank Koops (Aljoscha Stadelmann), who is no longer very young. He comes from the small town of St. Andreasberg in the Upper Harz (pop. 1,900) and somehow never made it out of his home village.
His office, which he maintains as the only police officer, is always in danger of being closed because of its tiny size – if it weren’t for the bizarre density of capital crimes in the town, which has been “gifting” corpses to the low mountain province for years. In this episode, Koops has to deal with rocker boss Andy Blome (Nicki von Tempelhoff), who has also returned to his hometown to sell a truck full of weapons to a foreign crime boss with his gang. Because the deal is threatened by a mole in his own leather ranks, Andy wants to have a suspect from his group jump over the blade in the forest early in the morning. The action goes differently than planned, and while the rocker boss chases his employee through the dark, autumnal Harz Mountains, he meets, of all people, his youth friend and police officer Frank Koops…
In the old “Fargo” style – a probably important source of inspiration for ARD’s Harz cases – in this crime thriller seemingly naive country bumpkins meet devious villains from the “big world” – which puts the cunning and cohesion of the village community to the test.
“Helen Dorn – After the Storm” (ZDFneo, 8:15 p.m.)
Police officer Tom Petersen (Johannes Zirner) becomes a gunman after his sister is murdered following an attempted rape at a boozy village festival. After all, she tried to take a photo of the perpetrator at the last second. In this situation, Helen Dorn (Anna Loos) from the Düsseldorf LKA has to protect Petersen from hasty revenge. The circle of suspects in the village in the Bergisches Land seems all too clear. But then in the eleventh “Helen Dorn” crime thriller “After the Storm,” a highly suspect is acquitted due to a lack of evidence. ZDFneo repeats the film from 2019 at 8:15 p.m.
Director Sebastian Ko absolutely loves it in this film. Not so much because the investigator has to worry about the consequences for her father, who is in a coma, but because Petersen, the police officer assigned to her, falls into a mad rage and threatens to take revenge on old acquaintances from the home village.
It’s enough for the sports ground landlord to say that his sister was invited to a lot of drinks and then disappointed this or that patron. And then forensic scientist Weyer (Tristan Seith) finds traces of oil on the dead woman, which point to the bicycle dealer Christian Jännicke (David Korbmann) as the perpetrator. When a witness appears at the village station who Jännicke believes she can clearly identify, the case seems solved. But things turn out differently…
This “Helen Dorn” episode aims less at discovering a perpetrator than at internal sensitivities. Anna Loos seems a little more haggard as the inspector than usual, even though she falls head over heels in love with the police officer Petersen. What is actually a rather thin plot is enhanced by the intense acting of the actors. Everyone speaks sotto voce, quietly and in half a voice, which is pleasant given the usual crime chatter.
“Helen Dorn – After the Storm” was the eleventh of 25 films in the crime series that have been broadcast so far, which since the 13th film is no longer set in Düsseldorf but in Hamburg. Two more films have already been shot. (This article was created in cooperation with teleschau.)