Men from Mars (2018)

Directed by: Hans Somers | 87 minutes | comedy | Actors: Huub Smit, Daniël Boissevain, Martijn Fischer, Jennifer Hoffman, Eva van de Wijdeven, Cynthia Abma, Frederik Brom, Daniël Brongers, Holly Mae Brood, Tarikh Janssen, Noah Meertens, Mark Rietman, Lisa Zweerman

The American relationship therapist John Gray already wrote it in 1992: men come from Mars, women from Venus and when they once came to Earth to live together, they conveniently forgot that they come from different planets. The differences between men and women are a welcome topic in novels, films and series. Because of the title, you would expect the comedy ‘Men van Mars’ (2008), directed by Hans Somers and produced by Johan Nijenhuis, to follow on from Gray’s theories and to focus on the friction that arises when men and women interact with each other. try to live together. Somers and Nijenhuis, however, turned it into a ‘buddy comedy’ that is an extension of ‘The Hangover’ (2009) and the two sequels that followed: men, who are actually much too old for so much nonsense, go completely crazy during a night steps. The clichés fly around your ears when it comes to men in midlife crisis: the gentlemen stubbornly deny that they are getting a year older and can no longer live like twenty years ago. The perils vary from a little too much excess kilos to the need for reading glasses and how insecure they are about their appearance, virility and masculinity.

‘Men of Mars’ has a nice start: three friends in their mid-40s, each with their own problems, are invited to a reunion of their old high school, Marsman College (hence ‘Men of Mars’). Peter (Huub Smit) is happily married to Monique (Jennifer Hoffman) and has a son and a daughter. Nevertheless, he is insecure, especially about his work as an industrial designer: on all sides he is surpassed by hip, young designers. During the reunion he is supposed to give a speech, but he sees it as a mountain. How different his old buddy Edwin (Daniël Boissevain) has a life; as a musician he cannot complain about the attention of the women. Yet he also has great insecurity: he would love to lead a bourgeois life like Peter’s, with a house, tree, animal, his great love Laura (Eva van de Wijdeven) and a child. But can he actually have children? Mark (Martijn Fischer) has very different problems. The contact with his wife Saskia (Cynthia Abma) does not improve and so the couple decides to go to couples therapy. But Saskia turns out to be very charmed by the therapist (Tarikh Janssen)… The three friends decide to use the reunion of their old school to go out for a weekend in the old-fashioned way. They book a room in Huis ter Duin – in the famous ‘Dick Advocaat’ suite – and go wild. They flirt with three young girls in the fitness room, have their chimes waxed at the beautician (which causes problems in the sauna) and in the evening they go to a hip disco where they drink themselves completely. Helium balloons are even involved. Oh yes, in between they pop by a fertility clinic to see if their ‘swimmers’ are still doing well. You never know when you are already 43…

In between the grumpiness, the men occasionally try to broach serious subjects – ‘how unfortunate for your husband that you can’t have children’, ‘do you still see your child now that your wife has run off with the therapist fifteen years younger? ‘ – but that more serious undertone barely comes into its own. And that while there is certainly potential in the troubles of Peter, Mark and Edwin. We see their problems often enough, but that doesn’t make it any less tragic. Somers and Nijenhuis, however, choose to emphasize the fun of underwear that made ‘The Hangover’ such a success. That is not original and the jokes are also barely out of the paint, they are simply too bland and vulgar for that. A sad low point is Peter’s newly depilated scrotum, which comes into view dangling and in full costume after he got stuck in the sauna. But the fun with the hair dye, which is regarded as a self-tanning cream, is also of a questionable level. It is a pity that the women have been given such a scant role in the lives of this trio; they could have provided the necessary balance. The three protagonists seem to have had a lot of fun during the recordings – at least that’s something – but that fun cannot disguise the fact that we are dealing here with cardboard characters with whom it is difficult to empathize. The message that ‘Men of Mars’ eventually sends us home is a dead-end: what they have really isn’t that bad. By the time the gentlemen find out, the average viewer has long since given up.

‘Men van Mars’ pretends to be a Dutch variant of ‘The Hangover’ and fishes in the same pond as that film: as soon as the three men start their trip, there is no stopping it and the ordinary, clichéd jokes pile up. If the characters are also intolerable and hardly an attempt is made to use the dramatic potential even a fraction, we quickly give up.