After serving 13 months in prison, Zeki Müller is released and immediately goes after the money stolen in a bank robbery, but is shocked that a Goethe high school was built on the land where he buried the cash. Müller thus forges a diploma and gets a job as a teacher in the said school, secretly excavating a tunnel under ground during the night. A young teacher, Lisi, blackmails Müller into taking over her class, 10B, the worst bunch of students in school, but Müller’s unusual methods get him a grip over the students. Müller finds the money, but Lisi orders him to leave school since he is associated with criminals. However, the principal hires Müller back as a teacher, since the class improved.
In one sequence, the slob protagonist Müller, who improvises being a teacher, is attending a rehearsal of a school play of “Romeo & Juliet”, and interrupts it, complaining that the sets look “like one of those channels you immediately switch away from after you accidentally tuned in”; that he has only seen a “porn version of Romeo & Juliet”; that the dialogues sound like relics since “Shakespeare has been dead for 4,000 years or so”; and that the main actor should tell them in his own words, causing the guy to say: “Juliet, I want to shag you, show me your boobs!” Depending on each viewers’ taste, these kind of ‘crude jokes’ will either be amusing or just downright embarrassing, and this can be applied to the entire film “Fack ju Gohte”, whose inclination is relative. The film seems like an inversion of the classic German student comedy “Die Feuerzangenbowle”, spoofing the teacher-student relations, but just done worse and dumber. Nonetheless, it was a huge hit in German cinemas by selling over 7,000,000 tickets at the box office. It is a shallow, but easily accessible and simple fun, with enthusiastic actors, especially Karoline Herfurth as the shy teacher Lisi who has a secret crush on Müller, who in a way seems to self-educate himself, undergoing a character arc from a primitive brute to a more likeable, enlightened guy. In one of the funniest early moments, Müller is so lazy that he does not even bother to teach the teenagers in class, instead just giving them the assignment to watch movies on DVDs for homework, culminating in a hilarious essay by one of the students who imagined being the T-Rex from “Jurassic Park” (“The electric fence is off. I can finally go out and explore my freedom. This day has given me hope in my life!”). The writer and director Bora Dagtekin intends to double-down on crafting only a simple, ‘rough’ comedy for the masses, even deliberately dodging some potentials for more touching moments (such as when Müller pretends to be Lisi’s boyfriend to help her keep custody of her underaged sister), and some moments are tantamount to a cartoon: for instance, the students from the problematic class concoct such ridiculous pranks on Müller like a bucket pouring tar on him from nowhere, or an explosion of feathers inside his car. A clumsy populist comedy, but it has its moments.
Grade:++
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