"Ein Engel namens Hans-Dieter", which means "An Angel named Hans-Dieter" is a German television movie from 2004, actually for the holidays 2004 (I think you can still say that if it aired 24th November 2004), so this one os already over 15 years old now. The director is pretty experienced television filmmaker Hajo Gies and the screenplay is by the late equally prolific television writer Michael Baier. However, experience is only really useful if it comes with class and sadly I must say these two have worked on many projects that are the exact opposite of top-notch. This also applies for this movie here, but I will get to that later in detail. The cast isn't too great, but not too shabby either I'd say. There are experienced actors in here whose names are still known and who also appeared on the big screen. Then again, there are also actors like Thorsten Feller here and I guess with him they wanted to attract the young (mostly female) daily soap opera viewers to give this film a chance? I don't know. I'm pretty sure even for them it was not a good watch. The title character here is played by Fritz Wepper and he is still among the better cast members, but mostly because the others are weaker and not because he is really any good. I have always preferred Elmar Wepper over him. Anyway, this is the story of a man who treats everybody badly. He cheats on his wife, but is also not really kind to his lover. He is really disrespectful towards his employees although they work really hard etc. And you know what comes already. Something happens that has him reconsider his priorities. Something supernatural even, so this is a bit of a Scrooge story, but just very basically. Hans-Dieter has a car accident and he dies in his car. This is what he finds out when he sees everybody at his funeral quickly afterwards. So his spirit still exists. Sadly, they were so scared that it may be too much to take for audiences to have the main character die that most randomly which did not make any sense given the funeral they just turn back time and he is alive again, but he has to get things into order. And of course the experience of (almost) dying was enough for him to do so.
In this afterlife sequence he meets Wolfgang Völz' character and he was maybe the only light at the end of the tunnel for this film. I don't know if he is the greatest actor, but I love his charisma and recognition value and the scenes with him were at least a 2 out of 5 I'd say. May he (and Karusseit) rest in peace. But almost everything else was a mess. This includes also relatively talented actors' story lines like Jaecki Schwarz' as he is clearly romantically interested in H-D's wife, but of course he never gets her and instead gets treated really highly disrespectfully by her. I felt bad for him. Then again she did not deserve him anyway. So at least one character I felt for, but even this is messed up because in the end he just enters into a sex adventure with H-D's former lover. Are you kidding me? Okay, at least the scene how they include her cleavage is somewhat bold and not too politically correct and I liked that (even if I found the woman zero attractive), but come on what a ridiculously bad plot twist. And this includes all kinds of other stuff too, other characters I mean with that. like basically all the central character's kids are somewhat unhappy with their activities, studies etc. It does not feel one bit authentic. By the way the man's daughter here is played by Wepper's real daughter, just a little piece of random information. Also because I kinda struggle to say more about this film. It is no 100% failure and like I wrote in the title of my review I was undecided for a while if I would give it 1 star out of 5 or 2 stars out of 5, but at the end it is just not touching, not funny, not memorable and there is nothing in here that stays in the mind, so it deserves the lower rating, even if looking at many other television films from my country here, this film is definitely not rock-bottom. But real talent in any fiel no matter which you're not gonna find here. I give it a massive thumbs-down and recommend you to stay far far away. By the way, it surprises me that Wham!'s tardemark song is mentioned here because it was really just included very briefly on one occasion where the song was played on the radio inside a car, so there is another very minor holiday reference that maybe makes sense to say it is a holiday-themed movie in the broadest sense, but really these 90 minutes (or slightly under) are not how you (should) want to spend your holidays. Skip.
In this afterlife sequence he meets Wolfgang Völz' character and he was maybe the only light at the end of the tunnel for this film. I don't know if he is the greatest actor, but I love his charisma and recognition value and the scenes with him were at least a 2 out of 5 I'd say. May he (and Karusseit) rest in peace. But almost everything else was a mess. This includes also relatively talented actors' story lines like Jaecki Schwarz' as he is clearly romantically interested in H-D's wife, but of course he never gets her and instead gets treated really highly disrespectfully by her. I felt bad for him. Then again she did not deserve him anyway. So at least one character I felt for, but even this is messed up because in the end he just enters into a sex adventure with H-D's former lover. Are you kidding me? Okay, at least the scene how they include her cleavage is somewhat bold and not too politically correct and I liked that (even if I found the woman zero attractive), but come on what a ridiculously bad plot twist. And this includes all kinds of other stuff too, other characters I mean with that. like basically all the central character's kids are somewhat unhappy with their activities, studies etc. It does not feel one bit authentic. By the way the man's daughter here is played by Wepper's real daughter, just a little piece of random information. Also because I kinda struggle to say more about this film. It is no 100% failure and like I wrote in the title of my review I was undecided for a while if I would give it 1 star out of 5 or 2 stars out of 5, but at the end it is just not touching, not funny, not memorable and there is nothing in here that stays in the mind, so it deserves the lower rating, even if looking at many other television films from my country here, this film is definitely not rock-bottom. But real talent in any fiel no matter which you're not gonna find here. I give it a massive thumbs-down and recommend you to stay far far away. By the way, it surprises me that Wham!'s tardemark song is mentioned here because it was really just included very briefly on one occasion where the song was played on the radio inside a car, so there is another very minor holiday reference that maybe makes sense to say it is a holiday-themed movie in the broadest sense, but really these 90 minutes (or slightly under) are not how you (should) want to spend your holidays. Skip.
