Compared to this movie Harry Potter, Asterix and classical fairy tales look very down to earth. They claim that magic exists and that if you know how to use it you can actually work miracles. Young Wickie's only power is his alleged cleverness. But his solutions just ignore the laws of physics and logic. And that's not clever at all.
At one point the ship of Wickie's Vikings has to catch up with another one that's quite ahead of them. A map illustrates the situation: Wickie's ship is on the right side of an island, both ships are heading for a place on the left side. Wickie sees that the route across the island is only a third of the route around it and gets the genius idea to just cross it - with their ship. Harry Potter would have figured something out and wiggled his wand, but Wickie's men really have to pull the big viking ship for miles and miles over land. Later on he uses some minuscule kites flying next to the majestic big sail of their ship to get it up into the air. Cleverness never looked that stupid.
The whole point of the Wickie character is that he's a small and weak Viking boy who is still of great value to his community because his ideas are based on the general knowledge of our times and therefore are way ahead of his. In this movie he's got only wacky ideas that even an eight year old should recognize as humbug. Still his inanities gain him the admiration of the elders.
All grown-up vikings are depicted as idiots, all kinds of idiots: the vain idiot, the bragging idiot, the cowardly idiot, the "No, I'm not stolen from the Asterix comics"-troubadour idiot. The kids and the women are basically alright, but the men are all half-wits. Would you really consider to expose your children to such hateful nonsense? A good comedy will lift you up, this annoying movie is set to dumb people down. If you are intellectually insecure enough to need to laugh about stupid people, you will like this movie because it doesn't feature anything else, but please don't expose innocent children to this junk.
I didn't read the "Wickie" books from the 60ies or watched the 70ies TV-show, but it would really surprise me if they'd be even slightly as heart- and witless as this Michael 'Bully' Herbig movie. Yes, that's the director's official nickname. Right in the beginning Wickie is forced by a big strong grown-up bully to engage himself in a duel of physical strengths designed to humiliate him in front of the whole village. Evil. Who's that bully? Wickie's father. Now that's really evil! This is definitely not a family movie.
