He’s equally apt at balancing the story of the protagonists with that of the impressive lineup of supporting players, who are all clever variations on clichés and are played by the impressive ensemble. Their sweet rapport is a nice antidote to much of the gross-out, caricature-like humor, and the occasional injection of highbrow references, such as a ditzy blonde student who’s called Chantal Akerman, is further proof that Dagtekin is a master at blending different registers. Her behavior is as saintly as Zeki’s profane where she gets all worked up when someone chews gum in class or uses an inappropriate word, her against-all-odds love interest does nothing but smoke, drink, swear, flip the bird, push one kid’s head under water or shoot another - and that’s when he’s teaching. Mueller’s main foil is the bespectacled good girl Lisi (Herfurth, M’Barek’s equal on all fronts), a fellow teacher who went to Goethe High as a teen.
By dialing the film’s tone way past hysterical - and at times, hysterically funny - from the start, Dagtekin succeeds in creating an atmosphere in which anything goes, but as in his previous work, he does ensure that the characters remain recognizable, even if their personalities have been greatly enlarged to augment the laughs. Of course, Mueller finds himself teaching a class that’s full of horrible teenage monsters indeed, who devise booby traps that have nothing on the work of seasoned special-ops soldiers. Nevermind that Zeki has no teaching certificate or any accurate knowledge of German (his mangling of the correct gender and cases is a running gag). In order to get regular access to the school’s basement, from where he hopes to drill a tunnel to his spoils, Zeki takes on a job as a substitute teacher offered to him by the prim principal ( Katja Riemann, in a delicious cameo), who is one teacher short after one of her staff ( Uschi Glas) had been so maltreated by her students, she jumped from a second-floor window, shouting “They’re all monsters!” Zeki Mueller (M’Barek) was in jail for 13 months, just enough time for Goethe High to construct a new gym on the exact spot where Zeki’s stripper friend, Charlie ( Jana Pallaske), buried his loot. The film’s $9 million local opening was the best score for a German film this year and second-biggest opening of 2013 and could also interest producers looking for Bad Teacher-inspired remake ideas.
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