When football was still an innocently chubby affair: That was the heyday of Kai Baroni, the famous number 9 of any famous eleven.

A kicker of the Poldi type, then, which Jürgen Vogel plays very appropriately with all his wide-legged Jürgenvogel-likeness.

Baroni's best friend Max Broll (Laurence Rupp), even a sauna lover, as Aufguss happily shows, is an old-school gravedigger (no excavators!) in the Austrian provinces and stepson or son (can't be exact) of the chief inspector Tilda Broll (Bettina Redlich ).

As two real boys like it, Broll and Baroni like to have fun with beer and flax at the private public viewing in the cemetery, to the horror of the priest, although in this case they don't watch a game, but - Mama Tilda, coming home from work tired ,

Among the Austrian radishes

They have no idea that just a few hours later, what a modern horror film like “Buried” (2010) has dramatically played out would happen to them, namely having to find a person buried alive before they run out of minimal supplies (an air tube provides oxygen until over the earth; by the way, that in itself is a classic design flaw that could lead to carbon dioxide suffocation).

After all, there is better mobile phone reception among the Austrian radishes than in the entire German province;

but no battery lasts forever.

The person buried is Max's beloved stepmother, who must have been kidnapped during the zombie massacre under the beer-stupefied noses of the two sports friends.

At least that's what Tilda gives

which once put the clearly recognized perpetrator (Martin Wuttke) behind bars, can be understood from the enclosed senior citizen's cell phone (without GPS).

So a psychopath revenge plot, actually a perfect through ball for Vogel and Rupp.

There is of course one problem, because the perpetrator, a “superstar of artificial insemination”, who not only proved his own potency during his inseminations (“He has fifty children?”), but also killed his wife, who had found out about it is still in a maximum security prison.

While a classic search for Tilda Broll, which is hinted at in tired scenes, begins, led by their newly separated employees Meral (Sabrina Amali) and Paul (Harry Lampl), the two Haudraufs in Baroni's climate-killer sports car set out on their own to search for the somewhat logically begins in the prison of the reproductive technology top scorer.

They put a lot of pressure on the doctor, bypassing all laws.

He in turn knows how to defend himself and hit the tough guys where it hurts them the most: with their wives, Hanni (Hilde Dalik) who runs a snack bar and the Russian castle owner Lana (Valery Cheplanova) - she pursues Russian richness.

The women's roles have turned out to be even dumber than those of the men.

The impulsively acting protagonists, however, are now going completely nuts, giving "kiss my ass" interviews, sticking fingers into the cameras, on which they write "Fuck You" to be on the safe side, or kidnapping people if they think it will be of any use.

There is still time for going to the sauna alone.

Stringing together old-school platitudes

Apart from the fact that Baroni's description "Arsch mit Henkelohren dran" is perhaps not a very accurate characterization of Wuttke's face - which nevertheless later contributes to an important advance in the search - the book is based on a meager novel by Bernhard Aichner by Harald Sicherheititz , actually a quota guarantor, a striking example of how one can get bogged down in old-school platitudes.

However, Sicheritz should know better, after all he did his doctorate on the topic "How does television entertain?"

Not with sophisticated dialogues in this case.

One waits in vain for Doctor Witz to say that even Poldi only foisted a sentence like “Football is like chess, only without dice”.

He likes it antiquated, legs apart: "Then you ask this bastard where your stepmother is." "We don't want to hurt you, at least I don't." "We're going to look for this Vinzenz and beat the truth out of him."

The director, who is also called Harald Sicheritz and entertains quite a bit with his brisk aesthetics, makes up for it a bit.

In addition, Vogel, Rupp and Wuttke play this virile nonsense, which ends in a hairy Western finale with (only optical) Hitchcock borrowings, with astonishing passion.

It's actually a good, almost subversive idea to design two investigative heroes who, with their penchant for stupid vigilantism, stand more in the way of solving the case than contributing to the solution.

A whole series of broadcasts was probably intended.

But with so much narrative impotence, it looks more like a preliminary round.

Broll + Baroni: Dead Forever

runs today at 8:15 p.m. on ZDF.