Coaster Kingdom
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Lethal Weapon Pursuit (Movie World Germany)

The following review will go into explicit detail regarding the attraction and the surprises it may conceal. If you choose to read on, be warned that it may detract from your first ride on the attraction.

Are you a member of the law abiding, yet always crave the need for speed, the yearning to involve yourself in a police chase, driving down one-way streets the wrong way and by and large causing disorder and damage down every street you drive? 

If this is you, or perhaps you would rather settle for saving the earth from the malevolence of Naught, then perhaps you should visit Warner Bros. Movie World, the closest Europe currently has to Universal Studios.

Much of the ride is out of sight taking place in rusty warehouses behind the Hollywood back-lot style street, which has the rather understated entrance to the ride. One of the main highlights of the attraction, the dual inline twists, can be seen elsewhere in the park and a preponderance of the twisted track from the car park, but as a new rider, most of the ride will remain a bit of a mystery tour.

The queue takes you into a cinema. A film depicts a scene from Lethal Weapon. As a getaway car speeds through the streets of American suburbia through a flurry of gunfire, people jump to safety to avoid the convoy of marked and unmarked police cars.

An unmarked car loses control, hitting another car at an awkward angle rolling into the window of an electrical shop. The black and white marked police cars continue the chase as it races off screen before the doors open for us to continue queuing.

The show may seem rather irrelevant, but the bearing of it will soon become apparent as you near the ride.

Once outside, you walk past the final scene of the red car on its’ roof, through the window of the shop, rubble and glass littering the street, before you climb some steps and enter the corroding depot in which you will board the ride.

The ride is a mixture of a duelling and racing coaster, using two completely independent tracks that often intermingle, and frequently race. The station is large and covered from the elements, loading two trains at a time.

The significance of the pre-show now becomes apparent. You are to continue the car chase in marked police cars. Each car is numbered, adorned in a black and white livery with head lights, tail lights and even a blue light on the back.

The trains have two cars in a normal two-by-two formation. I’m not the biggest fan of these trains, the same ones used on the shabby Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril at Disneyland Paris. The sides are high, claustrophobic and visibility is severely impaired by the seats in front. It is most definitely a front seat ride, if only for that reason, and even then, the mock windscreen is a bit of a distraction.

Once loaded, you leave the station and dip down before engaging on the lift. The trains rise in tandem with a handrail separating the two. To your right, another warehouse with the corrugated metal sides stained in rust.

The lift is rapid and quiet, and it isn’t long before the trains curl over the top, sharply dip before sweeping off to the left towards a warehouse. The right hand track dips below the line of the left hand before both burst through the corrugated wall of a warehouse before bursting out the other side.

Some nicely banked and surprisingly sharp corners follow, ducking and diving throughout, under and over track, you may get to see the other train dart either above you or below you. This part of the ride is rather lawless, it has no method in keeping the trains together, nor does it seem able to keep the other in sight, yet either by fluke or well calculated engineering, the tracks soon run parallel again, before diving into a darkened warehouse.

As you climb towards a partitioned divide coming down from the ceiling, the two trains sharply drop under here before you climb harshly up into a surprise vertical loop, hidden from view by the wall, now anything but, lit with strobe lights lighting the gloomy interior with a sharp and vivid radiance.

The loop is surprisingly large, and to the side of you, in tandem you can see the other train traverse the identical element as if staring into a mirrored wall.

A climb out of this is followed by a right-hand turn, dipping down quickly before beginning a second lift-hill. By the time the train has lost momentum and the chain has engaged, you are almost at the top before you dive off and back outside.

Not long after the breath of fresh air, you dive back into another warehouse, this time the police departments’ car compound. As the ride slaloms over bashed-up cars, a pungent smell of fumes fill the air, the frantic revving of engines, before you catch a speeding car heading towards you in your peripheral vision. As a collision seems inevitable, the car jumps and rolls over you in a spectacular fireball before you burst outside and into a perfectly formed roll yourself.

As you are flung through this perfect zero-g roll, your legs and arms flail, your weight falls onto the restraints and the contents of your pockets very nearly fall out.

As the trains recover, turning and twisting one last time, the two sides swap and you race into the final brake-run.

Although relatively unknown, this ride is a real surprise. The twisting of the two tracks towards the beginning may be a little disorganised, but the head choppers formed by the other track and the surprisingly tight dive through the first tunnel is fantastic.

On the first ride, the vertical loops just amaze. There is no way you could expect such a great loop to be hidden away like that. The theming afterwards distracts your attention away from the dead spots of track that follow this highlight and the finale that is to come.

The finale is perfect. As the car rolls over you in a ball of flames, you are stunned. You have no time to even gasp as the train is suddenly ripped out from under you, and your weight falls squarely on the restraints holding you in.

This inversion seems to go on forever and leaves you hanging for so much of that time. Lift your legs up, raise your arms and relax – it is wild.

There are so many highlights, very few negative points, and to finish by inverting the train under a flaming wreck of a car has to rate as perhaps one of the finest finales you could ask for in a coaster.

4/5 Marcus Sheen

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