Die Känguru-Chroniken

I am totally disappointed. Given the good quality books of Kling it is hard to imagine that anyone could produce a worse movie than this. 25 years ago, the Berlin dialogues would at least be kind of original, today it is full old cliché and this world is obviously long gone as well. What is even worse, the movie has not one likeable character in it. Always a very bad sign. Avoid.

3 stars are awarded for the kangaroo animation. Otherwise, the question is why you have to produce such a film at all. One would have "simply" used a drawing style to take out the actor discussion and to put the quick, precise jokes on point.

So it's just a normal German movie and in international comparison it's just 3 Imdb stars. Does money eat your brain here, Mr.Kling?

We all know that books are better than their respective filmed version. There is rarely a movie which is more enjoyable than the counterpart book. But from the likes of Marc Uwe-Kling - who even joked about making a movie out of this book in the very book - I definitely expected more.

This movie takes a number of random scenes from the books and somehow plasters them together into a more-or-less, but really rather less, coherent story. There is a more prominent focus on Jörg Dwigs and the nazis who were more of a real threat than in the book and the story tried to have a focus on some AfD-based jokes. But the focus was really not that funny, most such jokes already done thousands of times and the storyline just a mess. Even the actors didn't seem convincing and the best parts of the book were left out.

All in all unfortunately very disappointing and unexpected for such a fantastic book series. What a pity.

If you know and love the books you may come away a bit disappointed. Most of the humor which relies on the reader/listener having some familiarity with literature, philosphy, history is missing. All the more complicated or self-referential bits of humor are missing. It basically feels like a dumbed down version with some unneccesseary additions (e.g. a love story). Forcing the episodic nature of the book(s) into a coherent story was certainly not easy and it shows in the weak cookie-cutter plot. Actor quality is also a mixed bag. Especially the protagonist and main antagonist aren't cast particularly well or just weren't given enough to work with by the script.

That said the kangaroo CGI is good quality, the interaction between it and the other characters feel natural. The movie starts off funny and the pacing works for the most part. Some signature jokes were also incorporated well into the story.

If they take the criticisms to heart I feel they could crank out another one or two of these movies with better quality. There's certainly more than enough source material to draw from.

No fun, no plot. That's all I have to say. Didn't laugh, didn't sweep away.