Freewheeling Men - Comedy Pearls Vol. 5 - DVD

Film: Actually, it should be a long overdue time-out for Thomas (Wotan Wilke Möhring). The chain-smoking hypochondriac, who is still hung up on his ex-girlfriend, has given up his dream of becoming a writer for writing instruction manuals for luxury cars and who is regularly afflicted by panic attacks, just wanted to relax in the Swedish countryside. Together with his friends Jens (Mark Waschke) and Malte (Fritz Karl) he wants to escape all stress in the wilderness. But what starts out relatively carefree quickly turns into a chaotic nightmare. Because Jens and Malte also bring a lot of problems with them on holiday. Jens cheats on his wife with the young Karin (Jördis Triebel), who even follows him to Sweden. And Malte, who outwardly appears to be the carefree bon vivant with the big mouth, is up to his neck in financial problems. And the fact that he is soon to become a grandfather is something he cannot come to terms with at all. When then also the attractive Malin (Lisa Werlinder) apparently not only Thomas the head turns, it is actually only a matter of time until the tense mood threatens to explode.

TV director Matthias Tiefenbacher (Liebe und andere Delikatessen, Oh Tannenbaum) has turned Gernot Gricksch's bestseller Freilaufende Männer into a harmless TV comedy that hardly omits a cliché and therefore comes across as rather lacking in surprises, but overall knows how to entertain. The beautiful locations in Sweden, the good cast, from which especially Wotan Wilke Möhring and Jördis Triebel (Emma's Luck) stand out, and a few charming ideas make the whole thing, on balance, well worth watching.

The conflicts that Gricksch establishes in the screenplay version of his novel are unfortunately a bit too numerous to all be resolved satisfactorily in the end. While the first half of the comedy in particular takes a lot of time to address the problems of men around 40 in a rather amusing way, much of it fizzles out in the last third in a jumble of plot lines. This may work in the book, where there is enough time to give all the characters and their conflicts the space they need. But a 90-minute TV-movie is just too short and so the whole thing seems very superficial at the end. If the action would have focused even more on Thomas than it already does, the whole thing might have worked quite well. But this way the viewer feels a bit cheated of the appropriate resolutions for Malte and Jens at the end. Of course, their storylines are resolved as well, but it happens more in passing, and that just doesn't fit with the time spent on their stories in the beginning.

So, bottom line, Freilaufende Männer is nice, but unfortunately also quite superficial TV comedy that doesn't revolutionize the genre, but offers lovers of light German comedy entertainment enough successful moments to justify watching this DVD!

Picture + Sound: Since only a data-reduced press sample was available for the test, no rating can be given here about the picture and sound quality.

Extras: Except for a music video, the DVD unfortunately has no further bonus material to offer.

Conclusion:Freewheeling Men is a nice TV comedy that makes heavy use of all the clichés of similar TV comedies, but still offers enough wit and charm to be recommended to lovers of light TV comedies.

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp