Dekker & Adi - Wer bremst verliert! (2008)

Sick Product of a Sick System

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

"Dekker & Adi - Wer bremst verliert!" or "Dekker the Trucker" is a German/Swiss co-production from 2008, so this one has its 10th anniversary next year. The director is Sebastian Vigg and if I take a look at his other known works, I am genuinely worried about how this one here turns out. But it was tolerable, not as horrible as I expected, but certainly also far from a good watch. It says it all basically that a fairly limited actor like Mark Keller is perhaps the most memorable aspect from this film and he isn't even particularly good. As for Kaya Yanar playing a suicidal simple man, this was an inclusion I certainly didn't expect. And he did not do himself any favor by appearing on so many occasions in these 90 minutes. He was obviously included for comic relief, but it's never working at all because his material is honestly plain bad. And in the dramatic scenes about him, things don't look any better. Maybe this failure made Keller look better next to Yanar, so maybe it wasn't all for nothing. The family references reminded me a bit of Taken that came out the very same year. Honestly the ways in which he constantly hangs up on his wife weren't too bad and a decently funny running gag. The bad guys weren't too bad, but not great either and for me it was personally nice to see Brambach who is even good with not so great material like in here. Of course this is a small screen production by German television channel Sat 1, which also explains Yanar's presence I guess. So yeah, it's tough to say what this is, a bit of everything I suppose. It's definitely not a 100% action film as explosions etc. do not happen as often as you may think. But it's also not satisfying in any areas. The film's weakest is (apart from Yanar) the father-son plot because it is where the film takes itself 100% seriously and there is just no justification for that looking at the overall production values. All in all, not as much of a failure as I expected, but far from the level where I would recommend it. I guess Keller was somehow good for the part and that's why it worked occasionally. And that's a strange occurrence really, almost a phenomenon as this film required more charisma and physicality than range. If you like crap like Alarm für Cobra 11, you will maybe enjoy the hell out of it, but lets be honest this simply wasn't a particularly achievement and it is best to skip it. Also it may have been the right decision to not make a sequel as this one here was just not good enough and probably also not successful enough to justify that.