Verdict:
New Kids started as a sketch show about an asocial group of Dutch hillbilly stereotypes living in Southern Netherlands. The show was first released online. These miniseries contain quick low-brow humour that doesn’t care whom it offends, will cover any subject and doesn’t take itself seriously. The show had a one-track mind: lower class dudes from the 90s being anti-social. There weren’t many jokes. Situational humour and shock value were central. Still, well done for what it was. The characters were exaggerated but still close enough to the real thing that you recognized.
Now, the popularity of the show brought it onto the big screen, where it pretends to be a movie, but is basically the same miniseries as were shown on TV, just tied together with some string to be the length of a movie.
It is like the young writers and producers came to the director and said “We want to do an explosion. We also want to do this and that because some Dutch people will find it funny, and we want to do this because our friend here took a bet that we wouldn’t have the guts to show this on TV, and also this because we have always wanted to do it. Now let’s pull it all together into a movie.” Subsequently, the story unwinds itself halfway through the movie, a sacrifice needed to fit in all the other stuff these “Kids” wanted to do in their movie.
Look, it is still funny to see the “sjonnie” stereotypes – the actors are comfortable as those characters. Some of the jokes are pretty good, even if simple, and some of the scenes show signs of intelligence. However, the movie is not as funny as it pretends to be. In fact, the outtakes shown during the credits may get more laughs than the actual movie.
Overall, for a Dutch person the movie is worth seeing, even if just to be able to say that he/she did. For a more impartial entity looking at this film from the side, there will not be that much to praise. Well, at least, compared to the other generic stuff seen on TV, this will be something different.