When you think of soul, you think of gut-wrenching music about real emotions–good and bad–or hearty and heavy comfort food. Fatih Akin’s movie “Soul Kitchen” is a movie lacking in soul and, for a comedy, real hearty laughs.

This German film (with English subtitles) is a labored effort, looking at a young restaurant owner, Zinos (Adam Boudoukos) who runs the kind of dinner where the patrons are simply too lazy to heat the ready-made food up in  a microwave oven. The kitchen, run by Zinos, does include a microwave as well as one of those convenient consumer-grade deep fryers.  He serves frozen pizza, fish burgers, potato salad, Hawaiian burgers and mac and cheese. Not exactly what most American’s would expect from a soul kitchen.

The German-Greek Zinos has other problems. The old boat builder, Sokrates (Demir Gokgol) who shares the old warehouse where Soul Kitchen, the name of his restaurant, is located doesn’t pay rent. His rich girlfriend, Nadine (Pheline Roggan) is obviously slumming with him and is off to work as a major newspaper correspondent in Shanghai. Her farewell party is at a high class restaurant and Zinos is obviously only tolerated. The food impresses Zinos, and he witnesses the chef, Shayn (Birol Unel), being fired and hires him.

Shayn is the most interesting character in this predictable drama. He’s the Soup Nazi gone more high class and even more passionately threatening. Shayn punctuates his demands with knives.

Zinos has a brother who is a con artist , Illias (Moritz Bleibtreu), who gets out of jail on a work permit signed by Zinos, but only meets his shady friends at the restaurant. The restaurant is on prime real estate and someone schemes to get the place cheap (Wotan Wilke Mohring). On top of this, Zinos throws out his back attempting to lift a dishwasher by himself (don’t try this at home) and Nadine wants him to chuck it all and be with her in Chinese. To do what, it’s hard to say. Zinos can’t exactly teach the Chinese to cook.

So there are the ingredients and they didn’t amount to a satisfying hour and a half. Now if you wanted to focus on the crazy cooking genius Shayn, that might have been interesting. The shots of his food preparations are lovingly realized and the transformation of the kitchen was a cooks dream instead of the usual remodel nightmare.

This movie won a Special Jury Prize, Young Cinema Award at the Venice Film Festival in 2009 and was shown at the Toronto Film Festival in 2009 and the Tribeca Film Festival in 2010.

This movie won’t satisfy your heart, your funny bone or your soul or make you want to take a trip to Germany like the much better 2001 “Mostly Martha,” a German movie that was re-made into an inferior 2007 “No Reservations.” Pass on this movie and look for something more soul-satisfying.