Soul Kitchen is the newest movie directed by Fatih Akin, starring Adam Bousdoukos, Moritz Bleibtreu and Birol Ünel.

Plot:
Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos) owns a restaurant in Hamburg which iserves only crap to a very limited local audience. His girlfriend Nadine (Pheline Roggan) is moving to China. His brother Illias (Moritz Bleibtreu) needs his confirmation that he works in the restaurant so he gets days off from being in prison to get to work without actually having to work. And finally, Zinos gets a slipped disk trying to lift a dish washer, but unfortunately he doesn’t have insurance.  So, things aren’t going too well.
But then Zinos hires a new cook, Shayn (Birol Ünel). And with that, slowly his whole life is changing.

Soul Kitchen is Akin’s first comedy and I have to say that I’m less than impressed. With a rather formulaic story and a less than convincing actor in the main role, the movie fails to deliver laughs or anything else. Add to that a consentwise dubious at best sex scene and it’s a movie I can’t recommend.

At this point I have to admit that I’m a bad (German speaking) film geek since I’d never seen one of Akin’s movies before Soul Kitchen. [I know that Head-On is supposed to be really good and I will watch it one day.] But Soul Kitchen really shouldn’t be the movie to start getting acquainted with him.

The story (and the jokes and the writing in general) is really bland and it seems like something we’ve seen a bazillion times before. I can’t remember one scene where I actually laughed out loud because it was all so predictable.

While Zinos and Illias were actual characters, all the other figures (but especially the women) remained flat stereotypes at best, incomprehensible and motive-less at worst. Actingwise, the movie was fine, with the exception of Adam Bousdoukos (who, btw, wrote the script together with Akin), whose performance was rather wooden. (Might have to do with the stilted dialogue.)

But the cherry on top was the following scene [MINOR SPOILER]: So, there’s this huge party in Zinos’ restaurant for which they prepare a dessert with a mysterious aphrodisiac in it. During the party, a very uptight taxwoman comes to collect the taxes Zinos owes them. [Why would she do that at night? Nobody knows.] Zinos hands her one of the desserts, she eats it and immediately lets her hair down (literally) and goes on the prowl. [Because everyone knows that these uptight bitches are just repressed whores.] Anyway, she ends up sleeping with this guy in the middle of the (by then) rather empty restaurant. The guy takes pictures of her during the sex which he afterwards shows to Zinos. Together they laugh their respective asses off while Zinos comments, “dude, you fucked the tax office!”

In case you don’t know what’s wrong with that, here’s a handy list:

1. Drugging somebody without their knowledge? Not okay.
2. Sleeping with somebody who is drugged? Not okay [especially if they would never sleep with you otherwise].
3. Taking pictures of the person you sleep with without their knowledge? Not okay.
4. Showing those pictures around without the consent of the other person? Not okay.
5. Being shown these pictures and making jokes about them? Not okay.

And all of this for a plot resolution that could have been easily achieved in other ways…

To sum up: You’re not missing much if you don’t watch it.