"Die Migrantigen" or "The Migrumpies" (shoddy translation that offers nothing but a play on words) is an Austrian (mostly) German-language film from this year (2017) that runs for slightly under 100 minutes and was directed and written by Arman T. Riahi and his name is also an indicator of what this movie is about, namely the refugee and foreign culture situation in Central Europe on the example of Vienna this time. We have two nicely integrated protagonists with background of their parents coming from other countries. When they are interviewed by a documentary team, they pose as immigrants who really struggle with work, culture and life in general in their "new" home country. But yeah, it's all fake, but the way the two depict these foreigners quickly results into critical developments and an escalation of the entire immigration situation involving protests, guns and violence.
This is when the film gets dramatic, but lets start with the beginning. Early on, it is just a comedy and honestly the first 15 minutes or so were downright brilliant comedy writing. Then when the entire documentary story starts and the guys making inquiries about how to believe accurately for their plan to work it is still a decent film. The decline in quality continues afterward when it becomes more of a drama than a comedy and this felt already very much for the sake of it all and a desperate attempt to make a political statement. And then in the end, pretty much all the action in the television studio, is an embarrassing mess and this was definitely on the negative deal-breaker level, so if you split this film into 4 parts of 25 minutes or so, it gets worse with each part. In the penultimate part, the worst scene is when they rushed in a big argument between the two that came out of nowhere, made almost no sense at all and afterward, they acted right away as if it never happened. No clue what the writers were thinking with these scenes. Terrible. It's such a shame they did not decide to keep the approach from the beginning as the lack of political correctness in story-telling was very refreshing there and I would have loved another 75 minutes looking similarly. But they made many wrong decisions afterward and I need to be truly generous to give this one a positive rating still, but eventually I guess I do because if we had a great ending and a horrible beginning (so the other way around)), then I would have too. Just one example of how bad the television studio scenes were is when they head into the room where the cleaning lady tricks the employees, the employees are not even out for 2 seconds when our heroes head in, so they definitely would have seen them. But this is just one highly unrealistic moment from a closing sequence that is 100% unrealistic and unauthentic. On a completely different note, thumbs up for the actresses here: Schretzmayer did good with the mediocre material she was given and Zacherl sure looked stunning and I would have loved to find out more about her and her character's story. So yeah we might have a completely unrealistic happy ending here, but still this film is nowhere near the horrible level that Austria's neighbor in the north offers these days on the subject of the refugee crisis. At least this one here is still somewhat funny compared to crap like "Willkommen bei den Hartmanns". I give this award-winning Austrian film a cautious thumbs-up, it's worth checking out. Final note to all my fellow Josef Hader fans: He only has 2-3 scenes sadly, almost no screen time in here, but he is a complete scene stealer once again.
This is when the film gets dramatic, but lets start with the beginning. Early on, it is just a comedy and honestly the first 15 minutes or so were downright brilliant comedy writing. Then when the entire documentary story starts and the guys making inquiries about how to believe accurately for their plan to work it is still a decent film. The decline in quality continues afterward when it becomes more of a drama than a comedy and this felt already very much for the sake of it all and a desperate attempt to make a political statement. And then in the end, pretty much all the action in the television studio, is an embarrassing mess and this was definitely on the negative deal-breaker level, so if you split this film into 4 parts of 25 minutes or so, it gets worse with each part. In the penultimate part, the worst scene is when they rushed in a big argument between the two that came out of nowhere, made almost no sense at all and afterward, they acted right away as if it never happened. No clue what the writers were thinking with these scenes. Terrible. It's such a shame they did not decide to keep the approach from the beginning as the lack of political correctness in story-telling was very refreshing there and I would have loved another 75 minutes looking similarly. But they made many wrong decisions afterward and I need to be truly generous to give this one a positive rating still, but eventually I guess I do because if we had a great ending and a horrible beginning (so the other way around)), then I would have too. Just one example of how bad the television studio scenes were is when they head into the room where the cleaning lady tricks the employees, the employees are not even out for 2 seconds when our heroes head in, so they definitely would have seen them. But this is just one highly unrealistic moment from a closing sequence that is 100% unrealistic and unauthentic. On a completely different note, thumbs up for the actresses here: Schretzmayer did good with the mediocre material she was given and Zacherl sure looked stunning and I would have loved to find out more about her and her character's story. So yeah we might have a completely unrealistic happy ending here, but still this film is nowhere near the horrible level that Austria's neighbor in the north offers these days on the subject of the refugee crisis. At least this one here is still somewhat funny compared to crap like "Willkommen bei den Hartmanns". I give this award-winning Austrian film a cautious thumbs-up, it's worth checking out. Final note to all my fellow Josef Hader fans: He only has 2-3 scenes sadly, almost no screen time in here, but he is a complete scene stealer once again.
