The Kangaroo Conspiracy

The kangaroo and his human buddy Marc-Uwe (Dimitrij Schaad) are back! And this time they have to fight for their home, which they will lose if they don't succeed in freeing Maria's (Rosalie Thomass) mother from the clutches of climate deniers. So it's off to the Conspiracy Convention in Bielefeld for the disparate duo, where maverick thinkers and conspiracy theorists from all over Germany meet. Including conspiracy guru Adam Krieger (Benno Fürmann), for whom the marsupial and the dorky cabaret artist are quickly becoming a thorn in the side with their damned love of truth and facts....

I personally am not a big fan of "The Kangaroo Chronicles", which hit theaters in 2020 before the first Lockdown. Among connoisseurs and fans of Marc-Uwe Kling's books, the film adaptation provoked mixed reactions - from great enthusiasm to bitter disappointment. For the sequel, Kling has now taken over the direction himself and yes: "The Kangaroo Conspiracy" works better than the first part. Some gags are really funny and also the story is better worked out than the one from part 1, which still seemed arg cobbled together.

However, I had the same problem with part 2 as with its predecessor. It is not to be faulted in itself, if a film positions itself politically clearly. But also "The Kangaroo Conspiracy" makes it all too easy with the drawing of its enemy images. While the predecessor was a very striking and thus unfortunately not always accurate bashing of the AFD and its supporters, here it is the lateral thinkers and right-wing conspiracy theorists who get their fat. My problem, as I said, is not the positioning, but the fact that there is no nuanced consideration of the people against whom one is taking the field here. By really putting everyone who has any doubts and doesn't follow the generally accepted guidelines into a certain corner, a film like this doesn't contribute to fixing the problems, but rather to exacerbating them.

Yes, of course the whole thing is a satire and there an exaggerated tone is also perfectly okay. But "The Kangaroo Conspiracy" is often just too one-sidedly striking, too simplistic in its enemy images and nowhere near as clever as the film would like to be to also capture the gray areas of the issues dealt with. And that would have been quite important in view of the already poisoned climate of discussion. Apart from that, especially the humor is an improvement over the first film, which is why everyone who liked "The Kangaroo Chronicles" should hop over to the kangaroo's second cinematic adventure. Exactly for this target audience then also applies: worth seeing!

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp