"Ganz der Papa", impossible to translate, maybe something along the lines of "just like daddy", is a German television film from 2012, so this one is getting closer to its 10th anniversary now. It runs for 1.5 hours, slightly under, like the majority of German television films, and the director is Matthias Steurer. Now I have seen other stuff from him that did not impress me at all and his body of work has a lot of mediocrity to it (gently-speaking), so I was pretty skeptical if I could like this one here, especially because this was just the second writing credits by Holger Joos and already there were many years since the first. And after all, it is a German television film that airs regularly two or three times a year around noon or in the afternoon and there are many many German films on that time slot and 90% of them probably are really really bad. Luckily, this one here is the exception that confirms the rule as we say here in Germany. I liked the watch for the most part. The strngth is that it has a lot of heart. That made it fairly easy for me to forget about the weaker moments. The general idea that the kids got switched back then at the hospital feels really unrealistic already, also that it took so long for the dad or a doctor to realize something's wrong. Or why he would go see the other family and not contact the hospital directly. Or the sequence in which the whole apartment ends up flooded. So there are definitely far too many scenes and sequences here that sucked or made too little sense from a realistic perspective for me to say that this ever could have been a great or amazing movie. It is a decent one though. The three (yep one character is played by identical twins) child actors who really have a lot of screen time here are all doing a decent job and fittingly with the man's daughter in here who is a big football buff, I see that the two actresses who played her are also athletes. Not professional though it seems. It surely is a pity that neither of the three girls acted in another film after (or before) this one here.
The big name is maybe Jörg Schüttauf and I saw more films from him and he is almost always at least decent, even if the script and story and performances around him aren't. So I am happy to say he did well in here too. Same for Julia Richter and I have rarely een a more stunning woman in her 40s. Good performances by everybody involved and as a consequence also good job by the casting directors. I also want to mention Peter Franke. He does not have as much screen time as the four characters at the center of it all, but when he is on it, he is pretty good and adds more quality to this movie. It's also nice to see ho they made the characters flawed, bit likable in a realistic fashion. Just take Franke's character and his suggestion that Schüttauf's should maybe keep it fro himself, even if I don't think this was a valid advice ever and also really would not have been fair. One thing I did not like too much was how tehy elaborated on the football background here. The commentator early on was certainly more on the cringeworthy side and also how the main character even played for Germany back then before an injury ruined his career. And why is his name almost like Andreas Brehme. This cannot be a coincidence right? Anyway, even there they made up for it quality-wise here and there with the talk about his injury and how it is such a complicated name. Okay, here and there, the film goes back down to bad again, for example when he runs away with his real daughter and almost completely ignores the patient. Sure they wanted to emphasize how happy he is to spend time with his child, but still. This was not good. All the football and piano parts were fun though. The film's title could have been better honestly because the daughter with the brown hair is not the real daughter, so she is not "ganz der Papa" (like Schüttauf's character) and especially not like her read dad, who seems to be totally unrealiable. There were more nice inclusions like the different styles in which the characters eat that could show us something about whose genes they got. The worst moment of the film was maybe when there is that emergency near the end with the girl at the football stadium. Now that felt really forced and like pseudo drama. To a slightly lesser extent, this also applies to the ending when the girls ran away together on their birthday. But they kept it low there, probably realized that it was not working out too well in terms of suspense and danger. And the moment when the two parents stand together and see the girls and kiss was pretty nice for once too. I also liked that Schüttauf's character admits he can't swim and normally in these films the men are depicted as either completely despicable or really perfect, so it was nice to see a touch of weakness for once. This movie ended up as a positive surprise for me. Better than 99% other films shown on German afternoon television. Watch it. I also liked that they kept the number of characters low and instead elaborated properly on each and every single one of them. But the video game was so much older than 2012 haha.
The big name is maybe Jörg Schüttauf and I saw more films from him and he is almost always at least decent, even if the script and story and performances around him aren't. So I am happy to say he did well in here too. Same for Julia Richter and I have rarely een a more stunning woman in her 40s. Good performances by everybody involved and as a consequence also good job by the casting directors. I also want to mention Peter Franke. He does not have as much screen time as the four characters at the center of it all, but when he is on it, he is pretty good and adds more quality to this movie. It's also nice to see ho they made the characters flawed, bit likable in a realistic fashion. Just take Franke's character and his suggestion that Schüttauf's should maybe keep it fro himself, even if I don't think this was a valid advice ever and also really would not have been fair. One thing I did not like too much was how tehy elaborated on the football background here. The commentator early on was certainly more on the cringeworthy side and also how the main character even played for Germany back then before an injury ruined his career. And why is his name almost like Andreas Brehme. This cannot be a coincidence right? Anyway, even there they made up for it quality-wise here and there with the talk about his injury and how it is such a complicated name. Okay, here and there, the film goes back down to bad again, for example when he runs away with his real daughter and almost completely ignores the patient. Sure they wanted to emphasize how happy he is to spend time with his child, but still. This was not good. All the football and piano parts were fun though. The film's title could have been better honestly because the daughter with the brown hair is not the real daughter, so she is not "ganz der Papa" (like Schüttauf's character) and especially not like her read dad, who seems to be totally unrealiable. There were more nice inclusions like the different styles in which the characters eat that could show us something about whose genes they got. The worst moment of the film was maybe when there is that emergency near the end with the girl at the football stadium. Now that felt really forced and like pseudo drama. To a slightly lesser extent, this also applies to the ending when the girls ran away together on their birthday. But they kept it low there, probably realized that it was not working out too well in terms of suspense and danger. And the moment when the two parents stand together and see the girls and kiss was pretty nice for once too. I also liked that Schüttauf's character admits he can't swim and normally in these films the men are depicted as either completely despicable or really perfect, so it was nice to see a touch of weakness for once. This movie ended up as a positive surprise for me. Better than 99% other films shown on German afternoon television. Watch it. I also liked that they kept the number of characters low and instead elaborated properly on each and every single one of them. But the video game was so much older than 2012 haha.