Saw this movie yesterday in...Metropolis Antwerp. As I've lived my whole life in Antwerp it's always a lot of fun when you see locations on a big screen that you know so well.
I didn't really know what to expect from this movie, so I just let it wash over me. And that was precisely the best attitude you can have when seeing this movie.
It doesn't rely on a deep story, but more on it's funny dialog ,one-liners and relationship issues. From the start we were just blown away by how funny the jokes were written in this movie. Also the delivery from the outstanding cast was very good.
Especially the older actor playing "Sinterklaas", this is a holly man that you can compare with Santa Claus/Father Christmas but he arrives from Spain on the 6th of December by boat with chocolates and mandarins. He has 2 or more helpers called black peters.
This character/actor raised the rating of the movie to brilliant as he is the worst with little children, but he's forced to be around them anyway.
There are a lot of good scenes that come up with him and it would be a shame to spoil them, but let's just say that there are 2 scenes that stand out : One is when he's trying to explain who "sinterklaas" is to an American black actor whose never heard of this holly man. So he goes and says something like: "Sinterklaas has some black men that are his slaves... and when kids are good we give them treats, but when they are bad we put them in a sack and hit them with a stick..."
Now you can imagine how this must come across for a black person in general... just terrible. But for those who know the tale of sinterklaas it's a lot of fun as we know what he means and it's not that he's wrong, he's just saying it wrong.
Another one is when he's trying to explain something about having children to little kid's, but he get's mixed up in his own stories and it turns out that pikachu (from Pokémon) had a little baby , etc,etc...
One little kid then points out that pikachu was a boy... so all the parents around are just laughing there *ss off and he goes like: "uh, yeah.. he WAS a boy but now he's a girl... uh... how this happened, I'll tell you in another story... "
Man oh man, brilliant if you hear this kind of speech... and there's a lot more of this going on.
Some other characters also have good lines but he blow them all away.
But then if you think back about the film, the sad thing is that it's really predictable, there are no plot changes as there's hardly a plot in the first place. It's more a "day in the life" kind of thing and it rests solely on it's script dialog.
Even just one hour after seeing the movie we forgot almost everything that had happened as it's just a roller-coaster of people coming across the screen and bumping into one another in the most bizarre circumstances.
This makes the movie somewhat forced to keep the ritme going but hey, I had a lot of fun watching it and I can advise anyone that just wants to see a light funny romantic movie to go see this one, lay back and enjoy.
9/10 for comedy and romance 5/10 for lack of story and plot which makes an even 7/10....
Best regards,
Raf
