Didi - Der Doppelgänger

A wealthy businessman and the owner of a rundown pub share one thing in common - they look like identical twins! When the businessman hears of a plot against him, he hires the pub owner as a decoy. However, the pub owner is accident prone and causes more trouble than he is worth. An action-packed, physical comedy.

Now this is the movie you would like to watch if you're interested in what German comedy movies are all about. The fine thing about this movie from the 80s is that it works on two levels. First you can watch it as a slapstick comedy and you will greatly enjoy Didi Hallervordens very own way of messing up offices and business meetings. But the movie is also a very clever piece of satire about business managers and their way of talking and behaving. That's the reason why I loved this movie as a kid and I'm enjoying it even more when I watch it now. Obviously Dieter Hallervorden had a great time making this movie. His acting is simply superb, both as clumsy barkeeper Bruno Koob and as the cold and cynical businessman Hans Immer. The script is one of the funniest in German movie history and the story (taking a lot of surprising turns) manages to keep suspense at a high level throughout the whole movie. You won't meet a single German that grew up in the 80s who can't quote some lines from this German movie classic.

I absolutely agree with Bjoern Kahlenberg's comment on this film. But unfortunately, no-one who's not speaking German will ever understand the humor of this film, or find anything funny about it.

Now that the film is finally published on DVD, I was able to watch it with the English-dubbed voices. The dubbed version doesn't only suffer from maybe the most uninspired dubbing-speakers ever. No, the worst thing is, that the English text doesn't't have any similarities to the German content. And so absolutely every gag, especially those lines me and my friends quote from time to time, is destroyed. Too sad, it's not only the "play-on-words"-lines. If you can't speak or at last understand German, please don't watch this movie. You'd get a absolutely wrong impression of German sense of humor. Well, maybe you can watch it without sound and laugh about the slapstick.