Sarita Rafferty
There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.
Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de)
"Der kleene Punker" is a wordplay as "kleene" is the Berlin slang variation of the word "kleine" (German for small). However, even I as somebody who grew up with this Berlin accent cannot say much in support of the way it is handled here in these 80-minute comic book adaptation. And the fact that the film is obviously set in Berlin too did not help the film as much as I hoped it would. The Udo Lindeberg reference was completely random and did not add anything. Maybe the reason is that this is simply not a good movie. It is not even close to director Michael Schaack's efforts for the Werner movies and looking at the fact that this was done between the brilliant first Werner film and the solid second, it is pretty much an overall disappointment. The humor and parallels have some similarities to the Werner franchise (which consists already of 5 films now), but it feels all not entirely thought through here in "Der kleene Punker". Also, Lilo Wanders is in the cast here, just like in the Werner films. At least it is not as bad as Schack's "Little A**hole" duology.The old Bolle supermarket brought some nice nostalgia and I had to think of Asterix when they told how Berlin is completely free of punks except for one part. I'm not sure if that was intended though. The humor is fairly vulgar, lots of burping included here, but not half as obscene as Schaack's later work, sadly not half as funny either. The key to making this obscenities work as funny is by making them side action to the real comedic scenes and not use it as a primary mean of comedy. Sadly, there is not much backup here. There is some randomly talking rats and a the main antagonist is a huge police officer who wants to get rid of punk, so he would receive a medal. I personally found the boy who is the little punker from the title slightly boring, so exactly what punk should not be, in fact. Another problem that this film has is that they introduce supporting characters as quickly as they disappear again. So they either remain totally pointless and uninteresting or it sucks because their story is not developed any further. A loss-loss scenario.The funniest moment maybe was when they used a word play "zur Sau machen" which includes a female pig in German and means pretty much to humiliate somebody, so they depicted one of the central characters as a pig. Somehow, I found that funny. And yet, I have to criticize again as they use this very exact joke near the end of the film as well. You'd expect that for a film considerably under 90 minutes, they would not run out of material so quickly. One of the characters was voiced by somebody with a similar voice like famous German comedian's Dieter Hallervorden. I checked and it is not him though.Finally, i cannot really recommend this film. Mostly, I found it a disappointment and the animation was not exactly great either. that would have been fine with a better story, but nope. Not in this movie. The forming a band and then forming a political party sequences did not have me particularly glued to the screen. Watch something else instead.
