And so Jan Verheyen is back for more, after a first movie and a tv-series about a group of friends who play football together while facing the challenges of supporting a family and becoming parents.
The plotlines are pretty believable in and of themselves: one of the central couples in the movie turn out to be barren en therefore try to adopt a child, only to be hindered at every turn by a sneaky little bureaucrat. One of the other members of the football team has a problem with his girlfriend performing as a stripper. Yet another one becomes father to triplets, one of them is blackmailed out of a promotion at work etc... You can almost conceivably imagine these things to happen in real life.
But the problem with this movie is that on the one hand, it wants to talk about problems that real people face (not being able to have children, trouble at work, depression after having a baby, feeling like life is closing in all around you after becoming a parent etc...), but on the other hand, it also wants to be a feel good-movie. And that means that no matter what, the script has to bend over backwards if necessary to get to a happy ending. Every problem must be resolved, every tear needs to be turned into a smile before the credits roll. And I'm afraid it'll be painfully obvious to anyone over the age of twelve that life just isn't like that. The movie tries to have it both ways, and the result is a story that ends up losing all credibility it might have had at one point.
Also, it must be said that the product placement was strong in this one. At two points in the movie, the story is essentially just stopped in order for one of the characters to shamelessly advertise a Belgian internet provider. I mean, having the main characters wear the logo of this company on their uniforms is one thing (what do we care, after all?), but basically interrupting the story for a commercial, like they would on tv? Come on!
I think that part of the problem is that Jan Verheyen, this movie's director and co-writer, is a great producer, but not much of a writer or director. He knows how to sell a product, he knows how to edit a movie so that it'll flash by in what seems like a second, but he simply doesn't know a good story, nor do I think he cares much, as long as he's able to produce something that's just slick enough to appeal to an audience of popcorn-eating teenagers. Somewhere beneath the charicatures that populate this story (Axel Daeseleire and Tania Kloek play two people who are described as "belonging to a lower social class" and do this with all the vulgarity and condescension the cliché image of such people demands), there actually might be a decent movie waiting to be found. A lot of these characters are interesting, have some appeal at least, and some of the basic storythreads deserve to be fleshed out more in a movie that's not afraid to sell you something that doesn't smack of a mega-happy ending.
