Marginalci

Look, I know that it is difficult to make any kind of film in Croatia, let alone a quality one. It is even more difficult to make a quality comedy, as our filmmakers have been proving to us for decades. All that being said, dear brother, this was horrible.

My wife and I started watching this movie with the best of intentions and the hope that we would laugh or at least think "Well this isn't bad at all.", but boy oh boy, were we disappointed... I had slightly higher expectations from a pretty solid cast.

The film begins with the information that the Croatian Audiovisual Center gives millions of kunas to various projects, but they did not give a penny to this project. Already after the opening 3-4 minutes of the film, it becomes perfectly clear to you why CAC didn't give a single penny.

The jokes are terribly shabby, without a trace of anything original. The plot practically does not exist, everyone in that fictional Zagorje village is shown as borderline retarded and dressed as if they had fallen out of 1913.

The whole film seemed like one long episode of "Nad Lipom 35" or some dumb series from Nova TV, like Dar Mar, with the fact that for some parts of the dialogue even the screenwriters of "Nad Lipom 35" would say "Come on people, we need something better..."

A scene here and there was borderline funny, but nowhere near enough to give this movie more than a 3/10 and that's because I'm feeling generous.

Instead of the filmmakers wondering why CAC didn't give this a dime, everyone should be wondering how and why this ended up on Netflix.

I watched the trailer on youtube and decided to give the film a chance. I saw the movie in the local cinema. Now I'm trying to find words to actually describe my disappointment with what I saw. From the first minute of film to the end of the film some forced unpleasant and uninteresting humor prevails, stereotypical humor I would say, it is an attempt of something, I don't know what, something shabby, something cheap, small-minded humor (if we can even call it humor). Everything is full of clichés and some kind of corny humor. This is a visibly low-budget film with very poorly done visual and sound work. A very bad example of Croatian cinematography, even more a sad example. Some famous actors from the region appear in the film, that's true, but having famous actors is not the only criterion for a good film. Everything here is poorly done, including the film's story itself. The biggest and only comedy in everything is that they managed to take money from me for a cinema ticket. I don't recommend this to watch for anyone even if it was free, this is not even a below average time killer!

"Marginalci" is a feature length comedy movie which aims to poke fun at Croatian countrysides and the disfunctional rural governments led by often inept and unskilled individuals.

Living in such a place I was fairly interested in what this movie had to say about our backwarer counties and it's no surprise that I was immensly dissapointed by the disgusting portrayal of stereotypes and ignorant social commentary of this movie. Croatian comedy stems from what I would refer to as character ridicule, much like in British comedy, our comedy heroes are often inept, cringe-worthy individuals that we point fingers at and collectively laugh seeing parts of ourselves in their portrayal. While "Marginalci" attempts to make use of such comedy, it fails miserably as instead of seeing humorous portrayals of ourselves and our neighbours we are met with over the top caricatures whose portrayal is downright grotesque.

Comedy failings aside, the plot is hard to follow with multiple protagonists and no clear progression to the already contrived plot. Characters are one-dimensional and often feel as though they were written for one joke only which had to be stretched across the entire movie. The best way to describe this movie would be early 2000s Croatian comedy skits ( which were never funny to begin with) weaved into a nonsense plot filled with bad dialogue and poor writing.

It's a shame this is what Croatian cinematography has come to, that being said, outside of our animation studios such as Zagreb Film, Croatian cinematography never really had much to take note of.

In short, "Marginalci" is hard to follow and fails at what it aims to do, the only reason it did not recieve a one star rating is because of "Milan Pavlovich" ( Kresho)'s part which made for a good few laughs.