Männerhort

The plot of this movie is this: Three men want to escape the loving arms of their significant others at least once in a while, so they set up a secret man-cave in an abandoned basement room of their apartment building. Unfortunately the new "facility manager" (janitor) discovers their little paradise and tells them to clear off. In order to rescue their eagle's nest, our band of bros offer the janitor to join their club, but he's not interested because he's the one wearing the pants in his house. But then it turns out that the hapless janitor has a very dark secret indeed ...

This seems like the type of movie where you think: "Sweet premise, but I wonder how they'll make a 90-minute movie out of it?" As it turns out, the guys making this movie were apparently wondering about that, too. The movie struggles to kill time. At least the actors (Detlev Buck impressed me the most) do their darndest, but even Christoph Maria Herbst who is usually subscribed to misogynist dinosaur characters comes across as shallow here. In effect, a lot of the humor hinges on the premise that "women like to buy shoes while men like to drink beer and watch soccer".

This started off as a theatre play, and it still has this static, stay-in-one-location feel to it in the movie. The battle of the sexes and the changing of gender roles offers a lot of funny potential, but this movie didn't pick it up.

Or something like that. The movie is filled with clichés, but does not capitalize on them as good as it could have for comedy purposes. No one has to tell you that one guy outside our main male group who plays it tough, is actually anything but tough in his own home. So while the movie is predictable, the thing that really hurts is the fact that almost none of the jokes actually work.

Best of the bunch is Christoph Maria Herbst, getting a few chuckles with his character. He is known as "Stromberg" in Germany, a German version of the Office. Elyas M'Barek plays a bit with his image here, which would be nice if they actually had good stuff to support it. He's the flavor of the month right now, with his movies making a lot of money. That's no excuse for a poorly written script though. Remarks to German soccer/football are not helping either, making the viewer feel uncomfortable rather than amused. Still there are flashes of good things, mostly because one of the actors is giving us something ... to laugh about. Who'd have thought?