Didi auf vollen Touren (1986)

Didi, a warehouse worker who has spent many years at the headquarters of trucking company owner Grueter, now wants at last to fulfill his great career ambition: to become a long-distance truck driver with his own rig, which he has built from spare parts taken from Grueter’s warehouse. The driving test required for this, at the beginning of the film, turns out to be quite turbulent, since the examiner would rather watch a soccer match on a portable TV while wearing headphones. Believing that the examiner is watching him on video, Didi mistakes the man’s match commentary for instructions and follows them to the letter, regardless of the proper course of the road or oncoming traffic. At the end of the chaotic drive, the still-distracted examiner even signs Didi’s driver’s license. At the same time, highly explosive barrels of toxic waste containing cyanmesityl oxide are being loaded at a plant belonging to the industrial conglomerate Chemie AG, while the crane operator is also watching the soccer match. When a goal is scored, he makes a careless mistake in operating the crane out of excitement, causing a barrel to fall to the ground and explode. To keep the resulting media frenzy to a minimum, company boss Müller assigns the matter to his department head, Schulz. Schulz then puts pressure on Grueter to secretly transport 50 barrels of toxic waste to a landfill in France. Since he has no drivers available, Grueter turns to Didi and promises him an equal partnership in the company in the future. Believing he is transporting only used oil, Didi takes the shipment. Meanwhile, Schulz informs the press about the toxic-waste transport headed for France. Alarmed by this, the French minister responsible mobilizes the police, and the dim-witted Commissioner Bontemps (whose running gag is, “I’m the one who asks the questions here!”) takes, among other steps, to monitoring the landfill intended as the destination. Faced with the police presence, Marcel, an employee of that landfill, mistakenly assumes they have caught on to the waste shipment and lies in wait for Didi and his truck. Didi and Marcel, who acts like a would-be Casanova, are strongly at odds at first because Marcel keeps Didi in the dark about the cargo. Didi soon begins to have doubts about his assignment: first, one landfill after another turns him away with his load; then two pedantic motorcycle policemen, acting on Bontemps’s orders, make life difficult for him and Marcel; and finally, Marcel tries more than once to hijack the truck and trailer. Didi eventually manages, through his risky driving, to get Marcel to tell him the truth: Didi is carrying highly explosive toxic waste, and Grueter has shifted all the responsibility onto him. Cornered, Didi and Marcel join forces to get rid of the cargo somehow. As they pass through a small mountain village, one of the barrels breaks free and rolls into a bistro. At that very moment, the owner connects a gas cylinder, which explodes when an accidentally dropped cigarette sets it off. As a result, Didi and Marcel believe their barrel caused the explosion, just as they had feared. The renewed media frenzy over the incident makes company boss Müller doubt Schulz’s activities. But Schulz explains to his boss that Didi is in fact transporting only used oil. The lie about the supposed toxic waste was a ruse to set the press on the truck and divert attention from Chemie AG. Schulz needs the time gained this way—in this case, another 24 hours—to load the actual toxic-waste barrels onto a ship and take them out of the country via the Rhine. To keep the diversion going, Schulz travels to France to protect Didi’s truck from the police and the press. He stages roadworks and diverts the police, led by Commissioner Bontemps, to a farm. In spite of everything, Didi and Marcel crash the truck while trying to evade a police checkpoint and tumble down an embankment. Schulz then changes his plans to buy even more time: he tells the police where Didi and Marcel are, after which Bontemps arrests them, intending to show the supposedly toxic-waste barrels to the media and the minister later. But here, too, Schulz gets ahead of him and has the oil barrels taken away. Humiliated by the media fiasco, Bontemps sees only one way to set things right: he orders his motorcycle policemen to “accidentally” let Didi and Marcel go, which they manage to do after some initial difficulties. Bontemps hopes that the two men will lead him to the missing barrels. Didi and Marcel do indeed set out to look for them, but in a wine cellar they find only Schulz, who locks them in, tries to drown them in red wine in a winepress, and explains what is really going on. Ultimately, Didi and Marcel manage to escape from the cellar. They climb into Didi’s truck and, pursued by Bontemps and his police force, drive to the Rhine near the border, where they find the ship carrying the toxic waste. In a daring stunt, Didi drives the tractor unit onto a tugboat close to the riverbank. The impact breaks the tugboat loose and sends it into the path of the toxic-waste ship. This forces the freighter to stop, and the police are finally able to seize it. The toxic-waste scandal is thereby exposed and ultimately solved. At the end, we learn that Commissioner Bontemps receives an award, Didi and Marcel start their own trucking company, and Chemie AG, in the persons of Müller and Schulz, is fined. The toxic-waste barrels ultimately disappear without a trace when Germany and France arrange to have them disposed of jointly.