Vatertage - Opa über Nacht (2012) Reviews

• Ambition lost in forgettable feel-good stuff

  Horst_In_Translation2017-10-16

  "Vatertage - Opa über Nacht" (pretty horrible title) is a German 90-minute film from 2012, so this one has its 5th anniversary this year and the director here is Ingo Rasper and it is probably one of his more known works. The two writers have a handful of projects that are maybe more known and this one here is not the only movie on which they collaborated. The cast includes actors that you have heard of perhaps like Paul and Lauterbach, but their characters are minor. The two leads are Bezzel and Horvath and they are probably only known to huge German film buffs. This is the story of a successful businessman who finds out that he has a grown-up daughter from a one-night stand and this daughter is a mother herself already, so he is a grandfather from one second to the next. Or is he really? This is the question at the very center at the end of the movie, but until then it's a long road for him getting to know his daughter and show her that he is not the bad father she thinks she is. Besides, there is some stuff about the baby daddy, but that gets fixed eventually too as I indicated in the title of my review already. Sure it is never really a drama or a serious film (except when it occasionally tries to be and fails), but also from a comedy and a family movie I expect at least a bit of realism and authenticity, but this movie has very little of both and this refers to the Russian brutes apparently coming for the central character or the plot twist at the very end. But yeah, it's all (not) good as every conflict and issue gets happily solved within moments towards the end. I just cannot take the film seriously as a whole, even if it had some entertaining moments throughout. All in all, it's just not memorable enough for a recommendation. Watch something else instead.