Director: Steffen Haars, Flip Van der Kuil
Starring: Flip Van der Kuil, Theo Maassen, Marco Maas, Steffen Haars
This review by Rob Nijman for a new Dutch film.
New Kids Turbo, the movie based on the popular TV series New Kids, has taken the country by storm, breaking opening day records in Dutch theatres left and right over the weekend. Never before have so many people seen a movie premiere in so few theatres. The box office result easily outranks previous number one Komt Een Vrouw Bij De Dokter (Stricken), and the distributor has to reprint like crazy to bring the picture to more movie houses. Which is quite astonishing yet rather comprehensible, as New Kids Turbo may be the craziest thing in Dutch cinema since 1986’s Flodder, a slapstick comedy that spawned several sequels and television episodes by offering a lot of the same – and ended up in the all-time top five of most popular movies as expressed in ticket revenues. Apparently, as a country, we’re just not as sophisticated as we’d like to think.
The Flodders are a preposterously anti social family, that is offered a life in an upper-class neighbourhood by means of a rather shoddy plot, which turns out to be pretty much the last place they seem to belong – much to anyone’s surprise. Cue endless antics and parodies of cultural mismatch. The New Kids are, for all intents and purposes, second cousins to the Flodders. Lower class, anti social and absurdly backwards products of their restrictive environment (to the point of being retarded), the five friends the show’s built around seem to do little else than ridicule themselves and their part of the country – in a highly catchy fashion. Robbie, Rikkert, Barrie, Gerrie en Richard live in the small rural town of Maaskantje in the southern province of Brabant. Their accent does little to cover up their origins, and lies at the heart of the movie’s universe. The runaway feature film is indeed simply based on a couple of best friends (directors and co-stars Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil) and their hometown buddies from Maaskantje just having insane amounts of fun with the absurd stereotypes they’ve spawned on the basis of the demographic features mentioned earlier, layered with a rich-in-its-simplicity linguistic aspect of accents, vocabulary and tone of voice.
All exaggerated and mostly just surrealistic aspects of (stereotypes from) Brabant were at the heart of the series as well, but the movie obviously needed something extra. Not only to hold our interest, but efficaciously make us citizens of Maaskantje for the duration of the film. That something extra, besides an array of Dutch comedians and other celebrities from Brabant in cameo appearances, is the economic recession as an effective plot device. If you think these guys misbehave under ordinary circumstances, wait till they get canned and find out their monthly social security allowance is nowhere near enough to support their number one expenses: cheap beer and fast food. After an unlikely yet properly amusing escalating accumulation of rapport with government officials, the boys decides to stop paying for things altogether – as you do. Which is fine for a few days, save for your poor and defenceless gas attendants and supermarket staffers, but turns out to be the catalyst for an all-out revolution that goes as far as to encompass the entire province. Not paying for stuff any longer goes down quite well in the south, it seems. Until local law enforcement, the Ministry of Defence, a full platoon of riot police officers and even K1-superstar Peter ‘The Dutch Lumberjack’ Aerts get involved, and it all goes a bit south (no pun intended). A seemingly inevitable destination, after an extremely entertaining ride past a lot of absurd and crude sights by way of the downright ridiculous. But by then the ‘story’ has long since taken a backseat to the New Kids and their characteristic demeanour.
Much like Little Britain then, both the movie and the series look and feel like a guide to the way of life of the particular demographic group the five friends belong to. The comedy is derived from an almost endearing mockery that comes from either a self-deprecating understanding of your cultural background, or from the grateful joy of poking fun at those that are different, stereotypically or otherwise. As far as catchphrases go, I’ll leave those to your imagination. It’s not so much that they’d be entirely out of place in a movie review in terms of good taste in word choice, but it’s just that I wouldn’t be able to find fitting translations. In the Netherlands, the movie has skyrocketed use of the dialect in street lingo, which mocks and dotes on the southern part of the country in equal parts, and it doesn’t stop at a nationwide fondness of the boys from Brabant either: both Belgium and Germany have started airing episodes of the original series – for German television, the boys have provided the dubbing themselves – and no doubt the movie will soon follow. Who knows, the UK might even be next. Although The Flodders never made it across the Channel.
In the end, New Kids Turbo works because New Kids works, and the movie is basically a string of the show’s short, sketchy episodes stretched to a just-acceptable playtime of 90 minutes. Because sometimes you incessantly want nothing more than to sit back and watch a couple of idiots make complete and utter fools of themselves, their surroundings and an entire province in ways that can only be described as infectiously hilarious, just so you can go out and act accordingly. Guilty pleasure, jonguh!
