Die Wilden Kerle: Alles ist gut, solange du wild bist!

This is a German remake of the 1976 classic Bad News Bears, though rewritten to appeal to a more international audience. Bad News Bears is about minor league baseball, something very familiar within the American culture. Die Wilden Kerle is about a bunch of kids wanting to play a ball game, something very familiar just about anywhere on this planet.

The movie is in German, a language I had studied as a child but am rather rusty in now. But the cinematography and the acting were both excellent and completely made up for the fact that I understood at most 10% of the spoken language. It only proves that picture is worth a thousand words. And since a 96 minute movie contains more than eight million pictures...

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. It made me feel young again. I have heard it is a big hit in Germany. I can see why! This movie definitely deserves to be seen all over the world. If you can get your hands on it, you will enjoy it, too.

There's a breed of German movies addressed to the younger public and I remember this one being particularly pretentious. Saw this with my son in the theatre yrs ago. There's no need to burning DVD's.

No one ever asked about it. It's rather about making big fuss about children, certain children's names. Bits of fun here and there, but being unrealistic (families, strange freak etc.) is definitely not excuseable by calling it a "modern fairy tale". Quite the most introductory literature books tell these way away from this plot. A lack of strong characters invented for children seems to be the predominant problem; it takes courage...

People who see this movie (and the four sequels) as adults only, they might put them aside as trash, which I can understand.

But these movies had a great impact on the generation of people in Germany who were young when the movies were released, as they are for kids anyway. The production might not always be as well-made as in other movies, as well as the acting. Nonetheless the movies tell important lessons about friendship and the struggles of becoming a teenager. I want to show them to my kids later, as the movies are fun and there is still something to learn from them. Give them a chance. And the songs made by the Bananafishbones just for the movies are just as iconic as the movies themselves. They just make the experience a whole lot better.

It seems to me that the people who made this movie firmly believe that a football (as a European I refuse to use the term soccer ;-) is a much better toy for a ten year-old child than, say, a Playstation and that children not only can but should get dirty while playing. Therefore the movie is refreshingly reminiscent of the children's movies of the 70s, such as "Vorstadtkrokodile". The "wild blokes" (that's what "Wilde Kerle" translates to) use swear-words, they don't always obey their parents, they have tests of courage and there is no stay-at-home or well-behaved mummy's darling to be found anywhere. In other words: As a child I would have LOVED this film and as an adult I still find it very entertaining and worth seeing.

The minor complaint I have refers to the often unnatural dialogue. It's not the fault of the children that made up words like "Hottentottenalptraumnacht" sound stilted and strange; grown-up actors also would have trouble saying lines like this.

Finally I have to say that I like how this film seems to be a real family affair. Because he was unhappy with the way football is taught to children in the F-youth of professional clubs, the director Joachim Massanek founded and coached a "little league" football team for his sons and the children of some of his friends (also called "Die wilden Kerle") and later wrote successful children's books about their adventures. In the film the characters Raban, Maxi, Markus and Juli are played by some of the real "wilde Kerle". Other members of the team are played by the sons of Uwe Ochsenknecht and Rufus Beck (Willi).

Bottom line: This is a film not only for children but for anyone who remembers what it was like to play football at the pitch around the corner every afternoon after school.

This is a strange movie. As an adult I hated the kid characters of this movie so much, that I wished some serial killer would cut them all to pieces. How rude, disrespectfull and annoying they are! At the same time, I can see why this movie appeals to kids so much. Parents are trash, bedrooms only excist to be demolished and girls... well, in these young boys's minds they're from a different planet and not interesting at all... yet. The story is about a bunch of kids who love playing soccer (nothing wrong with that). After a school break they discover that some hooligans have taken over their favourite soccer-field. How do they get it back? And more importantly: why should we really care? Die Wilde Kerle is a movie about teamwork and respect. Both good things to make a movie about. But why put it in a form like this one? There is actually one funny scene in which the bad guys attack Camelot, a tree house that also functions as a fall out base for Die Wilde Kerle. But sadly that was actually the only thing worth mentioning. All in all: Die Wilde Kerle is great for kids, but I advise parents to either avoid it on TV or burn the DVD's when you have the chance!