Child's Head 2

After Lenny Feder (Adam Sandler) is reminded of how nice life was in his small hometown while reuniting with his former high school buddies Eric (Kevin James), Kurt (Chris Rock) and Marcus (David Spade), he and his wife Roxanne (Salma Hayek) decide to move their kids from L.A. to the idyllic backwoods. There, Lenny now enjoys the fact that he can spend more time with his family again. And also that he can regularly just be an uninhibited child-head with his buddies. But the idyll is abruptly shattered when, while visiting their favorite swimming hole, the four friends are roughed up and vigorously humiliated by a couple of half-assed college boys led by poser Andy (Taylor Lautner). Lenny realizes that the days of his youth are definitely over and that he slowly belongs on the siding. The fact that Roxanne wants another baby now, of all times, is totally inconvenient. But also the rest of the clique has to admit that it is finally time to take responsibility and to be a good role model for the offspring. And that's not possible as a childhead - or maybe it is?

Three years ago, the childheads made the cinemas unsafe with infantile humor and low jokes and apparently found exactly the taste of the audience. A worldwide box office of almost 300 million dollars made the comedy one of the most successful Adam Sandler films in recent years. A sequel was therefore quickly decided, especially since the actors, who are good friends with each other, had a lot of fun being unrestrainedly silly in front of the camera and getting paid for it. And what worked well once will draw audiences to the theaters in droves a second time.

And so, with Kindsköpfe 2, Sandler and his perennial director Dennis Dugan didn't even bother to create anything resembling a real story that would hold together the myriad burp, fart and barf jokes. Certainly, the inclined Sandler fan is given exactly what is expected. No one who buys a movie ticket for an Adam Sandler comedy is expecting intelligent wordplay, subtle humor, or pretension in any form. After all, the film makes it clear where the humorous journey is headed right from the first few minutes, in which Sandler is fully urinated on by a deer gone wild. But even though the comedy never tries to be anything more than an infantile fun movie, it's a shame that the makers don't have more to offer than fecal humor, oh-so-funny hairstyles, and grimaces that successfully defy any semblance of subtlety.

Unfortunately, what the viewer is treated to here also quickly feels tiresome. If Eric constantly gives his belch-sneeze-fart-triumvirate so popular with his buddies to the best, then this provides at some point even the most undemanding fan only for a tired smile. And also that the gentlemen of creation become drooling idiots at the sight of bulging cleavageés, is at most once funny. The over-the-top poser posturing of the cocky college boys is genuinely funny in the approach. But at some point, even that has died down. Here the unimaginativeness of the script is very clearly noticeable.

Part 1 was already no intellectual auteur cinema. Yet somehow that film still had some charm. There is hardly any of that left here. Kindsköpfe 2 is a dud in which the few good gags are buried under a whole heap of bodily fluids, borderline-debilitarian characters and flat kalauern. Loyal Sandler fans won't mind much, as that's what they want to see. But who already thought, with Jack & Jill or The Chaos Dad the humorous low point was reached, which is here painfully disabused. Therefore: only for die-hard fans of the actors worth seeing!

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp