Vorstadtkrokodile 2 (2010)

After gang member Elvis is sent to boarding school because of a graffiti incident, the Crocodile Gang is down to just seven teenagers: Olli and his sister Maria, Hannes, Kai, Frank, Peter, and Jorgo. At the beginning of the film, they set up a new headquarters in the abandoned shafts and halls of a mine. They do not stay undisturbed for long, however: Kai’s parents are planning a week’s vacation on Rügen but do not want to leave their son home alone. So Kai’s cousin Jenny, who is about a year older than he is, moves into his bedroom and cannot be shaken off when he goes out with the Crocodiles. More dramatic, though, are the events in Maria and Olli’s family. Both their parents work for a company whose entire machinery plant suddenly stops working, so the factory’s closure and the sale of the workers’ houses are looming. Maria and Olli’s parents therefore want to move with their children to their grandmother’s, in order to find work elsewhere. After exploring the mine with work lights from the company, the Crocodiles have already had a bad experience with two of the company’s employees: for reasons they cannot fathom, the Boller twins are still on the company premises late at night, behave extremely rudely, and drive their souped-up car in a pretty reckless manner. The Crocodiles decide to keep an eye on them and try to follow them into a popular nightclub. They are stopped by the bouncer, though, and have to enlist Jenny’s help, which Maria does not like. She is a little jealous and has taken a dislike to Jenny because she suspects Hannes is in love with Jenny now rather than with her. Hannes later clears up this misunderstanding in a private conversation with Maria. Jenny, for her part, gets past the entrance and lets the Crocodiles in through a back entrance. Hannes manages to eavesdrop on the twins and learns that they used a program on a USB stick to disable the machinery. But when the Crocodiles try to catch the Boller brothers in the factory halls, they end up in mortal danger: they are spotted and chased by car. They then try to convince Olli and Maria’s parents of what is going on at the factory by showing them footage from the factory’s cameras, so that the parents will call the police. But the parents do not believe the children and leave with Olli and Maria the next day, breaking up the gang. Meanwhile, Hannes and Kai have secretly found a potential partner for Hannes’s mother over the internet. This friendly, easygoing man, Dieter Gotte, arranges to meet Hannes’s mother at a restaurant and also visits the apartment where Hannes and his mother live. There, Hannes realizes that Dieter Gotte is the very person who has a conspicuous bright-red USB drive decorated with a skull sticker. Gotte wants to acquire the supposedly dilapidated machinery cheaply and sell it in China. On another visit to the restaurant, the reunited Crocodiles manage, using all sorts of tricks, to steal Gotte’s USB stick and swap it for another one, on which they have saved only a picture of the gang with their tongues sticking out. But before they can alert their parents or the police, Gotte has already noticed the switch and followed them into the mine with the Boller brothers. A fight breaks out, during which a charge of dynamite is detonated. Olli and Maria also reappear: their parents have come back with them to join other workers in protesting the closure. At the last moment, the Crocodiles save themselves, along with Gotte and the Boller brothers, whom they have knocked unconscious, using the mine train. After the explosion, it shoots out of a tunnel and lands in the middle of the factory grounds, where the laid-off workers are demonstrating and Maria and Olli’s father is giving a speech. Kai tells the assembled workforce about Gotte’s and the Boller brothers’ schemes, whereupon the gathering turns into a celebration. In the final scene, the Crocodiles and their parents dance at the nightclub; Jenny, who has grown increasingly friendly with the Crocodiles, becomes a gang member, and Hannes and Maria, who have been flirting with each other all along, kiss.