Troublemaker

In Grund prison, two petty criminals, Jacques Goudebour, who likes to call himself Johnny Chicago, and Chuck Moreno, meet and share the dream of becoming real gangsters in the United States. After their release, they plan to rob a bank together, but they do it rather clumsily and have to flee without any loot. "The cinematic odyssey of two crazy, sometimes slightly loud-mouthed outsiders between prison, desolate workers' housing estates and a world that only exists in their cinema-fuelled dreams and illusions; a film also about the incompatibility of European reality and the Hollywood dream world." (Encyclopaedia of International Film) "But despite his macho attitude, [Thierry Van Werveke] has always managed to imbue his characters with something vulnerable and melancholy. And perhaps he was able to prove it best at the very beginning of his career in Andy Bausch's ‘Troublemaker’ from 1988, which is about two Luxembourg boys who dream of becoming big gangsters in America, but who themselves only oscillate between prison and failed, amateurishly organised crimes. His name is not ‘Jacques Guddebuer’, Van Werveke shouts at the policemen at one point, but Johnny Chicago. ‘Main Numm ass Johnny, Johnny Chicago!’, as it is called in the original. And when he comes home to his girlfriend in the kitchen in this gangster comedy, Bausch shows him in front of a poster of James Dean. Van Werveke wakes up the child with his nagging and is told by his girlfriend that the child is just like him: ‘It screams around, drinks and produces shit.’ (Rudolf Worschech, on: epd Film)