Frits en Freddy

The annoying thing about this kind of lightweight crime comedies is that they seem to be the exact same thing over and over again. You have your hapless small time crooks, make them cross paths with some more dangerous criminals, something something stolen money, something something kidnapping, repeat ad nauseam. From the tired old central premise to the irritatingly stilted attempts at witty dialogue, "Frits en Freddy" just passes you by without delivering one memorable moment. For the most part it drags itself from cliché to cliché and just copy-pastes bits and parts from better movies. Take the tough guy henchman who likes to show his softer/intellectual side for example, that joke has been done to DEATH. I'm tired of seeing it in every crime comedy ever, just give it up already. This is also one of those really mellow crime flicks where nobody ever actually gets hurt, even when they get shot at from less than ten yards away by experienced gunmen. Sorta like in "The A-Team", only not cool. Not that violence makes any movie better, but the fact that clearly nobody's ever in real danger makes the story even less compelling. The only positive side to this movie is the fantastic cast, but then again it's not positive how all their talent is wasted. "Frits en Freddy" is a movie that makes me go "was that all?", and that's rarely a good sign.

Oh, I so wanted to like this movie ! Envisaging the kind of cinematic cool conjured up by the likes of Tarantino and the Coen brothers, writer Mark Punt and director Guy Goossens at least tried to do something radically different within Belgian cinema. It comes as a major disappointment then that each scene seems to play out like a pale carbon copy of a similar situation in a much better film, disfigured right from the start by the desperate mugging from both leads, the overrated Peter Van den Begin (who's only ever really good in measured support, as in Pieter Van Hees's vastly superior DIRTY MIND) and the unbearable Tom Van Dyck whose manic persona was better suited to TV rather than magnified onto the cinema screen. Overlooking the fact that Goossens and Punt had previously collaborated on the extremely popular if (because ?) wildly over the top TV series MATROESJKA'S, leaving no sleazy stone unturned in its tabloid type exposé of the strip joint and prostitution racket, I boldly ventured into my local multiplex on a dreary Thursday afternoon, hopes held high against better judgment, only to see my fears and doubts confirmed. Punt crafted a pair of superior commercial products like DIEF! and SHE GOOD FIGHTER in his day but appears to have been pandering to the lowest common denominator ever since. Going for hip, FRITS & FREDDY feels derivative and devoid of inspiration. Lines that were funny in its brilliantly edited trailer fall flat due to pathetically poor timing, surely the kiss of death for what purports to be a comedy.

Focusing on the Frateur brothers, a pair of wildly unsuccessful Bible salesmen, the narrative receives a much-needed shot in the arm from its cast of supporting characters, uniformly excellent (with the possible exception of pretty TV presenter turned wannabe thespian Erika Van Tielen) albeit ensconced within predictable parameters to any audience familiar with their work. Fresh from portraying the larger than life pater familias of a butcher dynasty in Johan Timmers's strikingly surreal THE ODD ONE OUT, Wim Opbrouck scores as money-laundering "rich bastard" (and predictable antagonist to the proudly proletarian protagonists) Carlo Mus whose tit for tat trade-off in mutual humiliation with the title characters informs what little plot the picture ultimately holds. Loose cannon Freddy pulls a gun on him, so he sets fire to the decrepit shack they call home, to which they retaliate by kidnapping his trophy wife Gina (the formidable Tania Kloek, a talented comedienne in dire need of superior material, seen to much better advantage in Jan Verheyen's TEAM SPIRIT movies) and inadvertently flattening his chihuahua under a grandfather clock ! Attempting to milk Mus to the tune of 100,000 Euro, the clueless goons find their plans thwarted by the double-crossing spouse who urges them to double the requested amount for her benefit as more and more innocent bystanders get unwittingly as well as unwillingly involved and unforeseen (except by cinema savvy audiences that have seen the movies that "inspired" the makers) problems start piling up until the dull thud of a climax barely qualifying as such.

I saw this with an audience of obvious cathode ray junkies who clearly delighted in spotting so many familiar faces from the small screen. Jan Van Looveren finds himself cast to type yet again as an albeit sensitive heavy after the first rate job he did playing the screw-up son in Geoffrey Enthoven's wonderful OVER THE HILL BAND with his sensible bro' from that movie, the perpetually befuddled Lucas van den Eijnde, bumbling his way through another incompetent policeman part, each carrying over his carved in stone TV stock character. Sole wild card may be the as of yet still criminally underrated Damiaan De Schrijver, so good as the strong silent dad of a retarded boy accused of rape and murder in Hilde Van Mieghem's LOVE BELONGS TO EVERYONE and genuinely touching here as the brothers' frequently abused blind neighbor. Loved the out of left field ice cream gag ! Ultimately, only Van Tielen lets the side down as a tiresomely "spunky" hitchhiker caught in the middle. But good actors need good lines and Punt doesn't supply them with a whole of those, going for the easy target every time. Film's final "joke" actually manages to offend not one but two minority groups in one fell swoop ! At least Finnish composer Tuomas Kantelinen, who penned the pleasingly atmospheric score to Renny Harlin's underrated MINDHUNTERS, keeps up the pace with too cool for school rhythms referencing Tarantino's high energy grab bag approach to movie music, especially RESERVOIR DOGS. As it was simultaneously freezing and pouring down outside, I didn't regret wasting an hour and a half of my life on this derivative claptrap too much. Still, my country's cinema has progressed in leaps and bounds in recent times, moving away from the "worthy" heritage literature adaptations it used to be notorious for. It's heartening nevertheless to witness filmmakers embracing styles and subjects previously deemed out of bounds, even if it does spawn the occasional failure such as this.

Frits and Freddy... where do I begin. The first thing that comes to mind is hilarious laughter from everyone in the maxed out movie theater during this film. If you've seen the trailer for this movie, that is what you get. The trailer is short and funny, which is exactly what this movie is about. I think the first time I and my friends stopped laughing for a moment, was already passed the one-hour mark of the movie. The end did feel a bit rushed as you're hoping they're gonna build to a climax, confrontation of protagonist and antagonist sort of speak, but that's not the case. I'm not saying it's a bad ending, is just sort of anti climax after laughing for an hour and 15 minutes or so.

They do leave the door open for possible sequels and I think if they can get the story right, it could become a successful franchise. Here's hoping for a sequel !!!

My advise is this, if you're in the neighborhood of a cinema showing this movie, do not pass the opportunity up!! This movie is exactly what we need at the moment... easy going, laugh out loud humor that'll make you laugh so hard you're gonna cry.

My sincere gratitude to Guy Goossens & Marc Punt for making this very funny movie !

Best wishes to everyone out there !!

Raf

Which is it?

To me, it was brilliant comedy, but only with the subtitles off. The humor is dialectic, the Devil's dialect which is special to Antwerpen is what is so funny. If one listens in Dutch or another Flemish dialect, they are unlikely to "get" much of the humour. The reviewer from Antwerpen "got" it; while the reviewer from Brugge either has a different sense of humour or perhaps didn't get all the language jokes. The movie is not so fantastic as to deserve a 10 rating, but it gets an easy 8 and probably an 8 1/2 or 9. Maybe this is one of those movies that you need to be from the specific locale in order to appreciate the humour. The subs are a literal translation and are so not funny, that it's funny.