THE MOVING PICTURE BOY ARCHIVE

KAMELEON 2

Title: Kameleon 2
Year of release: 2005
Directors: Steven de Jong
Country of Production: Netherlands
Genre: Adventure, Drama, Family
Length: 1 hour, 43 minutes
Language: Dutch
Availability: A DVD was released with English subtitles

Boy actors: This is the sequel to De Schippers van de Kameleon, and identical twins Jos and Koen van der Donk reprise their roles in the earlier film as Sietse and Hielke Klinkhamer respectively (below).

Synopsis
As in the first Kameleon film, a pair of hoodlums are once again threatening the village of Lenten, and it is up to our heroes to catch them. In a separate plot thread, there are plans to build a road through the village that will erase the old windmill and several homes, leading to a mother and her daughter Marieke, newly arrived from Belgium, facing eviction. The landowner who will be paid for the purchase of the land is an old Scrooge, but has a Scrooge-like transformation as a result of a good deed by the Klinkhamer twins. Marieke has a lung disease, and needs to take an expensive trip to a sanatorium in Switzerland if she is not to die, but how is her mother to find the money?

Marieke also provides a romantic interest for the twins; the intrusion of a heterosexual love interest for the boys was bad enough in the original film, and in the sequel it features heavily again. Altogether, there are too many elements in this film that are a repeat of the first film.

The original title for the film was Kameleon Ahoy!, which was the title of the second volume of the Kameleon series of novels by Hotze de Roos; but this was changed to Kameleon 2 because the final script had little to do with the book, the narrative being based on the filmmaker's own ideas. The best part of the movie comes at the beginning, when the twins in the Kameleon pass by an older pair of twins in a speedboat, dressed in identical overalls, as though an image of what they themselves will look like in middle age (right).

The film did considerably worse at the box office than its predecessor. It was followed many years later, in 2021, by a sequel, De Kameleon aan de ketting / The Kameleon Chained Up.

Screenshots