Horst in Translation ([email protected])
Just like the first movie, "Männerherzen 2" was written and directed by Simon Verhoeven, the son of very famous German actress Senta Berger and Michael Verhoeven, director of the Oscar-nominated "The Nasty Girl" a couple decades ago. It features some of Germany's finest actors and actresses from the first film and also a couple new faces. I would say the commercial reaction to this sequel was appropriate. Quality-wise it is slightly worse than the first part and also less people went to theaters and watched it. So far I haven't heard about a third movie. We will see if this happens or not. The ending of the first film did not indicate anything for a second film either, so maybe people can still hope.The very start we see that a lot what looked harmonic at the end of the first movie went south fairly quickly. Fitz' character loses his woman and the return of Schweiger's character to his supposedly great love did not work out either. Well.. they had to fill almost two hours of action, so there had to be some struggles to fix I guess. This film is about 15 minutes longer than the first part. There were some funny scenes. Of course Bruce Berger (Justus von Dohnányi) is probably the most memorable character from this duology and he is among the highlights here again as well, with some nice trashy music with earworm potential like in the original film. However, that final song "Positive Energie" was just one step too far and seemed really ridiculous and not in a good way as most of Berger's other songs. The parents of Schweiger's character and his alleged homosexuality were maybe the comedic highlight here. The ending was slightly too dramatic for my case. The attempted rape scene, the fire, the train scene - this was just a bit too much for a comedy and they should have kept it simpler instead of going for such an unrealistic grand finale.I have to say I was mostly uninterested in the fate of Fitz' character here and the whole crazy fan part was well.. underwhelming to say the least. Maybe the reason was that he became even less likable than in the first film. So his sort-of happy ending did not really impress me. And same goes for his storyline. What was good is that they did not give him some truly dramatic ending as well as for the others, but the whole tattoo/phone-call etc story was just not very convincing in my opinion. Möhring's character was interesting as there were quite a few parallels to the first film. Even if he is not totally against his ex' new relationship anymore, he risks to lose it all in one moment when he can't control his anger issues. Still the film has a happy ending for him sort of. And Ulmen's character occasionally looks like he could become Möhring's character from movie one, just like Fitz' does as well, but finally both get on the right track. Ulmen's character even ends up in the papers again. Boy, did judo help him in his life. Pasquale Aleardi plays a role in this film too, but I thought it was a bit unrealistic how he was connected to pretty much all the main characters all of a sudden.However, as a whole, the positive outweighs the negative and it was also interesting to see how the fate of the characters dealt with children in this film as well, be it preexisting (Ulmen) or unborn (Mehmet). It does not reach the heights of its predecessor, but has its moments. Recommended.
