koderone

The movie is everything I hoped it wouldn't be and I can't believe the author gave his blessings. It's a typical german comedy. In a bad way. Which means the humor is very silly. Which doesn't do the ingenious novels by Marc-Uwe Kling any justice, because the humor there is witty and more on the dry side. What made me cringe the most was what I'm sure will be sold off as movie "citations". Which even if you know they are meant like that just come off as blatant and shameless stealing. As a viewer I felt insulted. A citation has to do bring in new elements. It has to hint at the original just to show the appreciation for it. Put it in another context. Not stealing entire scenes and dialogues and even end with the same punchline. If you're outright stealing at least have the modesty not to copycat material that everyone and his grandmother has seen hundreds of times. The interaction between the kangaroo and the main character is unconvincing and weak. It looks like he acts to thin air. Which is made worse by the fact that the kangaroo's voice is coming from the off and doesn't fit in with the ambient sound. There's no reverb, no nothing. But you can see it's lips move, so it feels just awkward. The animation is not the best either. All the punchlines that put me to tears while listening to the audio books just don't fire because the timing is off. The story they've build around the source material is plainly dumb and uninspired tv-quality stuff. As is the cinematography, if you wanna call it that. German telenovela level. There's nothing I like about the movie which the books didn't do better.

This movie is your average german comedy and it does everything wrong that german comedies and movies in general get wrong. The humor is silly and depends for a big part on the actors looking funny and behaving in stereotypical ways. The lines are horribly written and the way the protagonists talk and act doesn't resemble how people actually talk. There is no depth to the humor, it's stale, flat and at times plainly dumb. The lighting has the typical telenovela look of german movies - oversaturated, undynamic, lackluster and it's never used as an artistic tool. This movie tries too hard to be something along the lines of Bang Boom Bang, a good example of a really funny and well executed german comedy, but fails miserably because it's just too tame and does nothing new. Some of the actors are well known and have been seen in better movies, but the acting in this movie looks downright amateurish at times. Something I blame on lack of direction and probably some really bad decisions in the cutting room. Also the lines are written in a way that barely make sense in a real conversation and would be hard to deliver for any actor. The characters are so bland you just don't care about them. I found it hard to watch it to the end and can't recommend it to anyone.

So... the premise of the movie is basically that humanity becomes almost instinct because no one has figured out that you could actually rig a bomb with a remote controlled sound device. Like, you could attract those primitive monsters which react to anything that makes noise and then blow them into oblivion and it would be actually THAT EASY to get rid off them. But literally NO ONE ever thought of this. Seriously? It is impossible to rate anything else in this movie, like the acting (which is actually not bad at all) when the underlying idea is so unbelievably flawed. It's an insult really.